Photo credit: Eyeball

As we head further into the future, search engines, as we know them today, will increasingly play an important and critical role for society as they invisibly determine which world views, information and references we should look at and rely on when in need to make important decisions.

Consider for example the fact that Google defines itself now as a semantic search engine. In simple words, this means that Google attempts to interpret what you really want instead of just serving you with a list of web pages that contain specific keywords.

The risky consequence of this is that Google, and any other search engine taking the same approach, will increasingly try to guess what you want and what is right for you, without ever letting you have a direct hand into this decision-making process.

But for a company (Google) that is also the market leader in search advertising, establishing a high level of credibility when providing search results could become an uphill effort. When in fact commercial advertising objectives do not match up with search user expectations and requests for greater transparency, it becomes a natural possibility that, if alternatives emerge, users will start to test and consider them.

But what alternatives and options do we really have?

What can we do to move the quality of search to a whole new level of granularity, transparency and effectiveness while shredding off any attempts to influence or altogether manipulate search results for specific business interests?

In my view, the best solution(s) could likely be found exactly where we could less likely look.

Let me explain why.

1) What’s Wrong with Google Search

To identify a new road and possible alternatives, I think it is necessary to put in good focus, what is wrong in the present search system, so that it becomes easier to identify solutions that address and resolve those specific limitations.

Here a short list of what I see as the main issues with the existing search system.

1. Quality of Search Results

Depending on the topic or industry you happen to be searching in, your mileage may vary, but in my personal experience the quality of Google search results cannot really be rated as ideal.

Often results are representative more of big brands and companies operating in the space, rather than being a true collection of the best resources on the topic.

Here some relevant comments and opinions:

“...higher quality sites are often further down in the search results because they’re not as popular as the sites that are ranked higher”.

Source: Is Google Dumbing Down Search Results? by Chris Crum, September 2013 - WebProNews

“...This is part of why I think I've developed a reflex, after searching Google, to skip over the first few results after the sponsored links and start looking near the middle of the page. W3Schools, Wikipedia, and a few others. And it's a great example of the central failure of the pagerank idea: if the strongest signal is popularity measured through linkage, the highest quality results will rarely be at or even near the top”.

Source: Lee Philips comment to the article Why I'm Planning to Kill W3Schools, September 2013 -YCombinator

“Google ranks results by popularity (by how many sites link to each result). This isn't necessarily the same as quality.

Google individualizes search results and may connect you to information that fits with your past searches rather than providing a balanced view of a topic.”

Source: Finding Quality on the Internet, September 2013 - Laurier Library

“...what is authority to the Google algo, is not what is authoritative to a human, and what its measure of quality is not human either”.
By Graeme_p

“The search engine may or may not come up with the best site...
Google are delivering what will satisfy the majority of searchers and not the most accurate, practical or relevant information”.
By EditorialGuy

“It really doesn't matter whether Google can measure quality or not, because it's only a very minor factor in their current ranking system. They had to de-emphasize it because it was preventing them from getting big brands and big organizations to the top of their search results.”
By Aakk9999

Source: Authority and Quality: Google Definitions vs Common Sense , July 2013 - WebMasterWorld

See also: Declining Quality of Google Search Results

2. Ads Intrusion

The number of “paid for” ads inside Google search results, as well as the amount of other Google information blocks complementing the basic results has significantly increased, to dominate under certain circumstances, most of the search result page real estate.

Ads have also become somewhat less distinguishable from the “organic” search results, reducing immediate recognition and differentiation between “paid for” results and organic ones even more.

See also: Google Gets Lowest Score Ever In Customer Satisfaction Survey

3. Credibility

a) Automation

Google relies heavily on automation, and algorithms to index, organize and rank search results or it would not be possible for it to scale with the amount of content existing online.

At the same time, automation and algorithms are generally considered of a lower quality when compared to human analysis, especially when it comes to evaluating the quality and credibility of an information object. In this respect, Google may have already reached the peak of what can be done by solely automating the organization and ranking of search results.

And one of the reasons of why the Google superpower may be soon losing its mojo is because
people are increasingly much less interested in pure listings of relevant web pages created by an algorithm that tries to guess what’s best, and much more in finding bundles of selected resources suggested to them by trusted references. Possibly human beings, they know (directly or not).

b) Conflict of Interest

Google is in control of what information you see when you search for something and how this information bits are ranked and organized. Wheter you like it or not it helps you build a world view and may influence it by selecting for you criteria by which to rank its results.

My question then is:

How can Google remain credible if,

a) It is totally secretive about it, even in the face of its own mistakes?

b) It is the world dominant search advertising platform, which pivots 100% around Google search engine, and which makes the majority of Google earnings?

That is: if you have a monopoly of the search market and control the search results, whether for the good or the bad, you can control the advertising market to your own benefit.

Then, while you could be saintest of the saints, how credible can you then be in such situation?

Link: The Google Panda Guide: Part 4 - The Future I Would Like To See

“The world's dominant search engine has been the focus of a European commission investigation since November 2010, after more than a dozen complainants across Europe accused the company of promoting its own services at their expense.”

Source: Google Offers Further Search Result Concessions in EU Anti-trust Case by Foo Yun Chee, September 2013 - Reuters

See also:

• Authority and Quality: Google Definitions vs Common Sense
• Does Google Know What’s Authoritative to a Human?
• Is Google Search Manipulation Hurting Consumers?
• Why does Google Search Suck so Bad Now?

4. Secretness

Google has always been very secretive about its search ranking algorithm to avoid unscrupulous marketers to exploit it to gain visibility in search results. While one can understand the logic of this approach, the results of undertaking it are also in front of everyone.

a) There are probably more people investing very significant time and resources to game Google than those who do not.

b) Google search results do not offer a qualitative search experience as they are often dominated by big brands and not by sites and pages that provide true, valuable information.

c) Google keeps investing large amount of resources to counter this gigantic and ever-increasing effort to spam and “game the system” with limited (in my opinion) results so far.

d) Due to the above listed items, and due to the vast damage done to quality content web sites, and the limited results in improving the quality of search results, public trust in Google’s ability to truly distinguish high-value content from spam and web site scrapers is generally quite low.

“While this is presumably done to prevent people from gaming the system (or competitors from copying features), it makes it a lot harder to determine whether Google is unfairly penalizing websites…”

“As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out in a blog post criticizing the move, Google’s search algorithms are opaque by design, and so there is no way of knowing what kind of criteria they will be using to decide which sites to penalize and which to leave untouched.”

Source: Should We Trust Google When It Comes to Piracy and Search? by Mathew Ingram, August 2012 - Gigaom

When so much of our life depends on having instant access to the right information, don't you think it would be very risky to depend on a centralized and secret system, driven exclusively by financial gains, to continuously influence how information is organized, ranked and classified?

In my view everything should be transparent. No company or brand should be able to game the system without being vulnerable to everyone seeing it.

5. Controls, Features

Easy access to valuable functions like search according to type of sources, timing, visual search, preview of search pages, have easily come and gone from Google in favor of providing a search solution that adapts itself to the minimum common denominator, while silently imposing a de facto rigidity in restricting user search abilities.

Shouldn’t Google offer me more search options rather than deciding for me the ones that I really need?

6. Fast Food Answers

Duration: 2' 06'' - What’s the Role of Curation in Search - Oliver Starr talkes about the impact of curated content on how people are now finding information on the Internet.

One thing is to have a full meal, one other is to fill yourself with edible stuff.

Google’s background and strength is in providing you with a ranked list of web pages that contain the set of keywords you have specified. But between a set of keyword-matched web pages ranked according to secret rules, and a well-reviewed round-up of the best resources on a specific topic, there is quite some distance.

One does not just search for finding the closest Pizza place.

Search is increasingly a vehicle through which find out, discover and learn about most things that one is not familiar with. A new topic or subject in which one wants to become more competent.

And when this is the situation, we definitely need something more than a list of popular web sites ranked by a secret algo.

7. Personalization

If Google wants to customize search results in order for me to have a better user experience, why doesn’t it allow me also to tweak and tune how those results are calculated and also how they are presented to me?

Google has demonstrated over time, with multiple public tests and versions of Google Search that integrated some of these functionalities, that it can indeed develop them effectively. Why then instead of removing altogether many such functionalities, doesn’t it let the user (when the user wants to) to decide how results should be ranked, formatted and presented?

If Google’s ultimate goal is to help me find easily what I am looking for, why not let me (if I want to) decide which are the variables and criteria I want to utilize to rank results instead of imposing a secret set of them on me? Why doesn’t it let me choose how to view, display, browse, scan or navigate search results?

Google rigidness in providing search results exclusively in a top-down linear, page by page, text-based list offers little or no opportunity to support different modes to search and declares that there must be one solution fitting everyone.

All of this is in stark contrast with Google search personalization strategy, where search results are customized for each search user depending on its past history, preferences and network of contacts.

See also: Escape Your Search Engine Filter Bubble

8. Privacy

When you search on Google, or other major search engines, are you actually providing personal private data to commercial companies and possibly to intelligence agencies of different countries or are you just conducting a truly “private” search, where no data is tracked, stored and associated to your name, IP and hardware setup?

See also: Don’t Track Us

2) The Profile of a New Search Tool

Given all the above issues, what could be the alternative search route available to us?

How could we escape the limitations imposed by the Google search model?

Proposal:

What would happen if it was me and you, individually, the ones who selected the criteria, ranking algorithms and penalization approaches to use to determine our search results?

My assumptions:

a) To make search results more useful, while becoming more trusted and much less vulnerable to being reverse-engineered and gamed by unscrupulous marketers, I don't think there is a need to make your search engine and your ranking algorithms secret.

b) Secrecy promotes and breeds black markets, underground work and a well-defined objective for everyone: uncover the secret. Reverse-engineer it. Game it.

c) Following the patterns we have seen at work elsewhere: from centralized to distributed; from top-down expert secrecy to crowdsourced, open-sourced and distributed co-operative participation.

Here is how I see my ideal future search engine:

1. Open-source
2. Distributed - P2P
3. User-controlled

Imagine if:

a) Search was similar to a free public service.

b) Users could see search ranking and filtering factors and, if they wanted, they could change them according to their own specific needs and preferences.

c) "Trusted search curators" for specific vertical information niches started to become themselves the new relevant results. The idea is that they could provide the needed "trust" and transparency to search results by co-creating curated collections on the topics in which they have already demonstrated a high level of competence.

d) An ecosystem of open-source public search algorithms, filters, aggregators and curated collections of sites and resources on specific topics emerged.

e) Content indexing became a distributed activity in the hands of we the users. With this approach, individual users contribute to index and add information into a shared database aggregating each user personal index.

In this fashion, users not ONLY would have greater control of what is actually indexed, but they would actually be creating a real search commons index - a collaborative effort by all users that is available to everyone. (An example of a distributed search engine - where peers collaborate to construct their search database - is the YaCy project. More info on this Wikipedia page).

In simple terms:

Turn the search ranking mechanism upside down by giving back control to who is searching and in need of taking decisions based on that information.

Achieve this by allowing the user to see at all times, what is under the hood and to have the option to modify it, rather than achieving this by personalizing his results univocally or by differentiating them from those of others based on history, preferences or the social graph.

3) Key Benefits

An ungameable system.

If everyone could individually select and rank results according either to their preferences, or by utilizing user-defined filtering pre-sets, ranking plugins done by experts and niche curators, it becomes much more difficult for anyone to game search engine results, as now there would be an infinite number of different ranking systems at work.

But unlike what Google does with personalization, the rules by which results are ranked are not secretely set by Google, but it is me and you who decide how we want to slice and dice them.

For those who wouldn't want to bother with tweaking and setting up their individual search preferences, they could be offered to select among alternative ranking algorithms (e.g.: Pre-Panda, 1998-style, etc.), or through open-source or paid-for algo pre-sets designed by users, groups or even other search engines themselves.

Commercial search engines like Google could even license their own algo as a plugin to use by paying a monthly subscription fee. Better yet, they could offer different flavours of it tailored to different audiences, applications and with different levels of customization possible.

Finally search users could also select to fallback on the preferences set by their close network of friends (on Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or even by Google (or other search engines) itself if they wished so

If you had no "online" friends and did not want to set preferences, paradoxically you could be given an alphabetical, or chronologically indexed set of results, and then you could move on to refine and distill what you need out of it, by applying on the fly, your own criteria.

If search was a distributed mechanism, there would be no central server, and thus there would be possibility to censor or block specific content.

Reliability would be significantly increased as single points of failure have been eliminated and the search index is stored redundantly across all users in the network that opt-in to participate.

It becomes possible to index and crawl contents, databases and web sites previously not accessible.

It is finally possible to achieve a high degree of privacy and to leverage the power of crowdsourced ranking.

4) What You Can Do About It

If you like the future of search that I am painting, you should not be sitting there waiting for it to happen. It won’t.

This future can only take place if you stop what you have been doing until now and you start doing something different.

Here a few simple suggestions:

a) Vote with your click

The first and foremost thing you can do to change the status quo, when it comes to online search, is to vote with your clicks. If Google does not offer what is your “ideal” situation, then do not support its growth and power by increasing your use of it.

b) Use alternative search tools

Start using an alternative search engine, among the ones that I suggest later in this article. Stop using Google or at least start to use it in combination with other alternatives.

c) Curate collections of quality vetted resources

If you are a subject matter expert or just passionate about a specific topic take into serious consideration the idea of starting to curate resource collections that can offer a one-stop-shop for those looking for insight into that topic.

Examples:

• Elearning Examples
• Marshall McLuhan Speaks

d) Speak up, share what you find

Speak up, share, let others know. If you find better results by using one of the alternative solutions available, or if you discover something new or valuable that can help other people search in new, effective ways, share your information via social media so that others can pick up from it and move forward.

5) Resources & Tools / New Search Tools

New search engines that already integrate many of the ideas and recommendations I am suggesting:

• YaCy
  A free distributed search engine, built on principles of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

  “YaCy runs on each user's own computer, and each YaCy user is part of a large search network. Each user's computer creates its own, individual search indexes and rankings, so no central entity has control and results better reflect what the user is looking for over time. YaCy makes it easy to create a customized search portal, and it protects users' privacy by encrypting search terms before they leave the user's computer.”

  Source: YaCy: It's About Freedom, Not Beating Google by Katherine Noyes, December 2011 - PCWorld

  See also:

  Wikipedia definition

  YaCy Project explained





• Faroo
  

  “FAROO is a universal web search engine based on peer-to-peer technology. It uses a distributed crawler that stores search data on users' computers instead of a central server. Whenever a user visits a website, it is automatically indexed and distributed to the network. Ranking is done by comparing usage statistics of users, such as web pages visited, amount of time spent on each page, and whether the pages were bookmarked or printed.”

  Source: Wikipedia





• zResearch
  Curated, collaborative next-generation search engine, allowing great customization and filtering of results, clustering and auto-categorization, some truly stunning alternative data visualization options, and the ability to collaboratively curate and organize search results into multi-level collections.

  
  

• Blekko
  

  "Blekko is a search engine with the stated goal of providing better search results than those offered by Google Search, with results gathered from a set of 3 billion trusted webpages and excluded from such sites as content farms."

  Source: Wikipedia




• Gooru
  Search curated collections of high-quality web resources.




• Glean
  A search engine for the best video lessons in education.




• DuckDuckGo
  Search the internet without being tracked.




• Seeks
  Crowdsourced search results ranking




• Dooble
  An open source web browser that complements YaCy Search Engine as an indexing tool.

See also: User-Curated Search Engine

Conclusions

Search as we know it today, could be a million times better, if we only decided that we wanted it to be so.

While we associate searching the Internet with Google, the future of search could be quite different from what you have been used to until now.

In my view in fact, this approach to search, will not remain the major, most common and most effective search solution available in the digital realm.

What is really best for us?

A centralized, secret and proprietary search engine driven by Wall Street or a distributed, fully transparent and open-sourced one that placed each and every user / searcher in the driver seat?

Put the choice of how to rank Internet search results results in the hand of the searchers, not in the hands of those who control both the search and advertising marketplace.

Let users index, refine, develop and improve search engine ranking algorithms by applying the filters and metrics that serve THEM best, and not only the Google stock.

Move from listing titles-URLs-descriptions to curated search results, in which "trusted search curators" will provide bundles of high-quality results, selected and organized together in new emerging formats.

If Google and the other major search engines are not willing to be transparent about how they organize, filter and rank information, how can you trust that the answers you are given do really provide you with the best option possible?

Access to information should not be based on some "social" secret recipe of what is good and what is bad, - that is taken care of by religions of this world - as there is no objective metric that can measure the different needs and information requirements of each human being.

Unless I can check it.

But unless you decide that Google should not be your only key reference for finding any kind of information that exist out there, then nothing is going to change.

Reference:

• The Google Panda Guide: Part 4 - The Future I Would Like To See
• The Evil Side of Google

Duration: 5':00 - Gilad Lotan from BetaWorks explains to Lutz Finger (Author of "Ask Measure Learn") why powerful algorithms can be as well a danger to society.

Playlist - Content Curation and The Future of Search (8 clips)

Originally written and curated by Robin Good and first published on MasterNewMedia on Tuesday March 11th 2014 as Future of Search.

Photo credits:
What’s Wrong with Google Search - Senior thinking by Shutterstock
The Profile of a New Search Tool - Identification sign by Shutterstock
Key Benefits - Check mark by Shutterstock
What You Can Do About It - Young man thinking by Shutterstock
Resources & Tools / New Search Tools - Zoom icons by Shutterstock

]]> 2014-03-11T16:24:00+01:00 http://www.masternewmedia.org/digital-media-trends-the-future-guide-to-the-best-predictions-for-2011/ What are the key new media, communication and social technology trends that are going to affect you the most during 2011? Photo credit: Ruben Sarkisyan In the coming weeks, me and the MasterNewMedia editorial team, will devote a large amount of resources and time to identify, collect, and organize the most interesting, relevant and insightful media and technology predictions for 2011, in a series of future guides dedicated each one to a specific topic. In this first Future Guide to the Best Predictions for 2011, I have personally spent some time to pick what I have found to be some of the most interesting "general" digital media predictions made. These include the thoughts, ideas and vision of people like John Battelle and Richard McManus as well as the ones of a few other prestigious editors from Mashable, Techcrunch and eMarketer. If you are looking to see beyond the surface and the obvious and get a glimpse of which are the key changes that are already under way and which will make a difference in 2011, expect this guide to provide you with some good foundations. ]]> What are the key new media, communication and social technology trends that are going to affect you the most during 2011?

Photo credit: Ruben Sarkisyan

In the coming weeks, me and the MasterNewMedia editorial team, will devote a large amount of resources and time to identify, collect, and organize the most interesting, relevant and insightful media and technology predictions for 2011, in a series of future guides dedicated each one to a specific topic.

In this first Future Guide to the Best Predictions for 2011, I have personally spent some time to pick what I have found to be some of the most interesting "general" digital media predictions made. These include the thoughts, ideas and vision of people like John Battelle and Richard McManus as well as the ones of a few other prestigious editors from Mashable, Techcrunch and eMarketer.

If you are looking to see beyond the surface and the obvious and get a glimpse of which are the key changes that are already under way and which will make a difference in 2011, expect this guide to provide you with some good foundations.

Digital Media Trends: The Future Guide to The Best Predictions for 2011

1) Techradar: New Technologies

What will be the new technologies that will shape 2011? Is 3D eally going to be massive this year? Will cloud-based applications become mainstream (think of Google OS)? Are we going to see more and more iPad rivals boosting the tablet market? Gary Marshall of TechRadar.com gaze and reports from his crystal ball.

by Gary Marshall - December 13th, 2010

2) Techcrunch: Key Technologies

Techcrunch co-editor Erik Schonfeld shares a sneak peek of the future trends which will shape the Internet in 2011: social media, mobile apps, touch computing, geolocalization, cloud computing will keep propelling the technology world forward by becoming more and more part of our everyday lives.

by Erick Schonfeld - January 2nd, 2011

3) eMarketer: Digital Media Trends

Duration: 59' 16'' - Click the image to open the video recording of the webinar in a separate window

A recording of the comprehensive eMarketer webinar hosted by top analysts Noah Elkin, Debra Aho Williamson and David Hellerman on the future 2011 trends for social media marketing, online advertising, privacy and mobile commerce.

by Daniel Caridi - December 17th, 2010

4) John Battelle: Search, Media and Technology

Federated Media John Battelle has published his predictions on the online landscape where he spans from "Voice will become a critical interface for computing" to "The tablet market will have a year of incoherence". If you want to see what one of the most respected voices in the tech world sees in the future of the Internet, you might want to check out this article.

by John Battelle - January 3rd 2011

5) Richard MacManus: Web Development

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb shares his own 2011 predictions for the tech world. For what he sees the Internet will be no longer restricted to your computer or mobile, by becoming more and more integrated in tablets, cars, eBook readers, TV sets, thanks also to "new" HTML5 technologies.

by Richard MacManus - December 27th, 2010

6) Mashable: Online Data

On 2010 there has been greater and greater focus on data, especially regarding social media and marketing. So what is at the horizon in 2011? Josh Jones-Dilworth foresees a new breed of professionals, services and start-ups that will jump on the online data bandwagon to help you and me to sort, organize and make sense of the information we share on the internet.

by Josh Jones-Dilworth - December 20th, 2010

7) ReadWriteWeb: Cloud Computing

Cloud computing blogger Chirag Mehta and analyst R "Ray" Wang share a list (Part 1 - Part 2) of their cloud computing predictions for 2011. The pair sees public cloud adoption stalling temporarily, the spread of the app store model in the enterprise, the convergence of Development-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service and an overall simplification of the technology landscape as some of the most important trends in cloud computing in 2011.

by Klint Finley - December 27th, 2010

8) Mashable: Small Businesses

A general overview of small business trends by Mashable editor Erica Swallow. What is waiting for entrepreneurs around the corner next year? Erica foresees small businesses will strive to get a solid online presence, jump on the social shopping bandwagon, engage in mobile marketing, leverage social media more than ever and start utilizing cloud computing solutions.

by Erica Swallow - December 21st, 2010

9) Mashable: Startups - Entrepreneurship

In this article you will find an exploration of five startup markets that will grow in significance in 2011. Some of these specialized categories are ripe for disruption and innovation, while others have already produced early leaders that will be difficult to best. Regardless, the startups iterating in these newly invented product categories will capture our imagination in the year ahead and transform the way we use technology in our daily lives.

by Jennifer Van Grove - December 31st, 2010

Originally prepared by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi for MasterNewMedia, and first published on February 3rd, 2011 as "Digital Media Trends: The Future Guide To The Best Predictions For 2011".

Photo credits:
Techradar: New Technologies - alastor
Techcrunch: Key Technologies - Ndul
eMarketer: Digital Media Trends - eMarketer
John Battelle: Search, Media and Technology - Business Insider
Richard MacManus: Web Development - ReadWriteWeb
Mashable: Online Data - Hypermania
ReadWriteWeb: Cloud Computing - PC World Vietnam
Mashable: Small Businesses - Baby
Mashable: Startups - Entrepreneurship - Bruce Shippee

]]> 2011-02-03T18:30:00+01:00 http://www.masternewmedia.org/real-time-news-and-content-curation-the-best-2010-articles-and-reports-from-masternewmedia/ Content curation is one of the most disruptive forces to have emerged in the last twelve months and one that will continue to expand its reach and influence in the coming years. Content curation, and with it, all of the infinite number of other curation sub-niches (video, news, social, products, data, etc.) will see a true blooming of applications, tools and services that will further enable individuals and organizations to create high-value content collections, digests, and newsradars of all kinds. Photo credit: yekorzh The explosive growth of the universe of content curation tools, testifies by itself the huge activity taking place in this field and the breadth of uses and applications that content curation will be able to embrace. What may appear as an obvious and effortless activity, carried out by hundreds of thousands of individuals sharing their favorite links on social networks is also a fascinating new opportunity to learn a new set of skills and generate new value by organizing the world of information that is out there. For those who have the time, passion and competence to do so, curation becomes the art and science of aggregating, finding, monitoring, selecting and organizing the best content on a very specific topic for an audience of people specifically interested in it. MasterNewMedia, has covered with a special set of articles this revolutionary new trend and here are the best reports on content curation, real-time news curation and newsmastering tools published during 2010. In this content curation guide:

• Part 1: Why we need it
• Part 2: Aggregation is not curation
• Part 3: Types and real-world examples
• Part 4: Process, key tasks, workflow
• Part 5: The curator attributes and skills
• Part 6: The tools universe
• Part 7: Business applications and trends
• Content curation and value: The business of context
• Content curation: Why is the content curator the key emerging online editorial role of the future?
• Online news content and distribution strategies: Content curation and user syndication are next
• Online content curation: The key to building visibility, authority and value

Here is the best on content curation from MasterNewMedia: ]]> Content curation is one of the most disruptive forces to have emerged in the last twelve months and one that will continue to expand its reach and influence in the coming years. Content curation, and with it, all of the infinite number of other curation sub-niches (video, news, social, products, data, etc.) will see a true blooming of applications, tools and services that will further enable individuals and organizations to create high-value content collections, digests, and newsradars of all kinds.

Photo credit: yekorzh

The explosive growth of the universe of content curation tools, testifies by itself the huge activity taking place in this field and the breadth of uses and applications that content curation will be able to embrace.

What may appear as an obvious and effortless activity, carried out by hundreds of thousands of individuals sharing their favorite links on social networks is also a fascinating new opportunity to learn a new set of skills and generate new value by organizing the world of information that is out there. For those who have the time, passion and competence to do so, curation becomes the art and science of aggregating, finding, monitoring, selecting and organizing the best content on a very specific topic for an audience of people specifically interested in it.

MasterNewMedia, has covered with a special set of articles this revolutionary new trend and here are the best reports on content curation, real-time news curation and newsmastering tools published during 2010.

In this content curation guide:

• Part 1: Why we need it
• Part 2: Aggregation is not curation
• Part 3: Types and real-world examples
• Part 4: Process, key tasks, workflow
• Part 5: The curator attributes and skills
• Part 6: The tools universe
• Part 7: Business applications and trends
• Content curation and value: The business of context
• Content curation: Why is the content curator the key emerging online editorial role of the future?
• Online news content and distribution strategies: Content curation and user syndication are next
• Online content curation: The key to building visibility, authority and value

Here is the best on content curation from MasterNewMedia:

Real-Time News and Content Curation: The Best 2010 Articles and Reports From MasterNewMedia

Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering and Newsradars - The Complete Guide Part 1: Why We Need It

Real-time news curation, or what I call "newsmastering", is the art of finding, aggregating, filtering, selecting, curating and republishing high-quality news stories on a very specific theme, topic, or for a particular audience interest, problem, passion.
Real-time news curation, is also an emerging, new online professional role, the news curator, or newsmaster in sorting, editing, enriching and picking the most relevant news and stories on specific topics-themes.

by Robin Good - September 7th, 2010

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 2: Aggregation Is Not Curation

In part 2 of this guide, you find the key differences between aggregation and curation and why real-time news curation is better than automated aggregation when it comes to provide high-quality news and information on a specific topic.

by Robin Good - September 15th, 2010

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 3: Types and Real-World Examples

In part 3 of this guide to real-time news curation you can find a full-blown showcase of real-world examples of good content curation, from basic lists to guides and news reporting, as well as some more traditional, or I should say, more familiar, examples of automated and semi-automated news aggregation.

by Robin Good - September 22nd , 2010

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 4: Process, Key Tasks, Workflow

In Part 4 of this complete guide to real-time news curation I am presenting, what I have identified so far as being the key tasks a real-time news curator, must attend to. My goal with this, is one of sharing with you my own discoveries on this topic, as I truly believe that news curation offers not only a great opportunity for subject matter experts to create additional value, but also a much bigger opportunity for society as a whole Internet to start making greater sense of the incoherent and hard-to-follow mass of information that we have are publishing online.

by Robin Good - September 29th, 2010

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 5: The Curator Attributes and Skills

in Part 5 of the guide on real-time news curation, I am covering the key attributes, qualities and skills a successful real-time news curator must have. To identify them I have been looking both at the experience I have gained with this practice in this last five years, as well as at the growing literature available online on this "content curation" topic.

by Robin Good - October 6th, 2010

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 6: The Tools Universe

This part of the Real-Time News Curation Guide is devoted to analyze the exploding universe of curation tools out there, what is out there, what characterizes these tools and what features we will need in the near future to make them even more useful. For this purpose, I have been putting together a curation toolkit map that attempts to map out all of the content and news curation tools available online.

by Robin Good - October 13th, 2010

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 7: Business Applications and Trends

Can real-time news and content curation provide enough value and unique content to potential readers to make it possible for curators to charge for access or for complementary services?
By scouting and researching what has been written on this topic and by tapping on my own experience and intuition, I have prepared this "curated" guide to the business side of news and content curation. In it you can find, often in the original words of who had it, the best insight and ideas on this topic, and what are the key drivers, opportunities and trends to pay active attention to.

by Robin Good - October 20th, 2010

Content Curation and Value: The Business of Context

If you are still struggling to discover the real value of content curation, and are wondering whether curating news (newsmastering), or any other specific content can indeed provide extra value to your readers, while creating opportunities for new business, I invite to listen closely to what George Siemens and Gerd Leonhard have had to say on this.

by Robin Good - , 2010

Content Curation: Why Is The Content Curator The Key Emerging Online Editorial Role of The Future?

In a world where attention has become so scarce to become as valuable as currency, and where quality information on a specific topic requires ever more time and attention to be found, the value that could provide those who have the ability to organize, select, compile and edit the most valuable information on anyone topic is incommensurable.

by Rohit Bhargava - January 20th, 2010

Online News Content and Distribution Strategies: Content Curation and User Syndication Are Next

What future and opportunities for online news? Content media expert, and Content Nation author John Blossom, analyzes AP recent moves and where the opportunities to change the course of things of online news may actually be.

by John Blossom - February 6th, 2010

Online Content Curation: The Key To Building Visibility, Authority and Value

If you want to understand the critical role that content curation or newsmastering, as I used to call this, will play in the communication ecosystem of today, and specifically why companies must embrace content curation to survive, read on.

by HiveFire team, Pawan Deshpande and Taariq Lewis - April 6th, 2010

Originally prepared by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi for MasterNewMedia, and first published on January 18th, 2011 as "Real-Time News And Content Curation: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia".

Photo credits:
Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering And Newsradars - The Complete Guide Part 1: Why We Need It - dsharpie and franckreporter mashed up by Robin Good
Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 2: Aggregation Is Not Curation - Creativaimage
Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 3: Types And Real-World Examples - dizeloid
Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 4: Process, Key Tasks, Workflow - Carl Swahn
Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 5: The Curator Attributes And Skills - thesuperph
Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 6: The Tools Universe - Robin Good
Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 7: Business Applications And Trends - ozgurdonmaz
Content Curation And Value: The Business Of Context - Robin Good
Content Curation: Why Is The Content Curator The Key Emerging Online Editorial Role Of The Future? - Luna Vandoorne Vallejo
Online News Content And Distribution Strategies: Content Curation And User Syndication Are Next - juliengron
Online Content Curation: The Key To Building Visibility, Authority And Value - Erkin Sahin

]]> 2011-01-18T14:34:00+01:00 http://www.masternewmedia.org/real-time-news-curation-the-complete-guide-part-7-business-applications-and-trends/ What are the business opportunities for real-time news and content curation? Are there key business drivers that companies can leverage to build new added-value content services? What are the major trends that will be driving the content curation marketplace? How will newspaper and magazines take advantage of such new emerging business models to keep their business afloat? Photo credit: ozgurdonmaz After having analyzed what are the reasons that are making content curation a necessity, and having illustrated what are the tools, skills, processes and workflow needed to realize such curation, it is time now to explore a bit the business side of things too. Can real-time news and content curation provide enough value and unique content to potential readers to make it possible for curators to charge for access or for complementary services? This is what I have set myself to find out. By scouting and researching what has been written on this topic and by tapping on my own experience and intuition, I have prepared this "curated" guide to the business side of news and content curation. In it you can find, often in the original words of who had it, the best insight and ideas on this topic, and what are the key drivers, opportunities and trends to pay active attention to. Here all the details: ]]> What are the business opportunities for real-time news and content curation? Are there key business drivers that companies can leverage to build new added-value content services? What are the major trends that will be driving the content curation marketplace? How will newspaper and magazines take advantage of such new emerging business models to keep their business afloat?

Photo credit: ozgurdonmaz

After having analyzed what are the reasons that are making content curation a necessity, and having illustrated what are the tools, skills, processes and workflow needed to realize such curation, it is time now to explore a bit the business side of things too.

Can real-time news and content curation provide enough value and unique content to potential readers to make it possible for curators to charge for access or for complementary services?

This is what I have set myself to find out. By scouting and researching what has been written on this topic and by tapping on my own experience and intuition, I have prepared this "curated" guide to the business side of news and content curation.

In it you can find, often in the original words of who had it, the best insight and ideas on this topic, and what are the key drivers, opportunities and trends to pay active attention to.

Here all the details:

Real-Time News Curation: Part 7 - Business Opportunities

1. Where Is The Money

2. Key Business Drivers

3. Business Applications: The News

4. Business Opportunities / Future Trends

5. Business Models

1) Where Is The Money?

“So here's a prediction.

Barring legal hurdles, one day we will see the likes of the Drudge go behind a pay-wall even if most of the content they link to is free.

If you are a publisher and you don't have enough good content to compete with the aggregators, you need to start linking out.“

Want Loyal Readers? Then Aggregate - Nico Flores

News channels in the near future will have no reason, incentive or advantage in trying to replicate what they do now: giving coverage to a handful of topics and stories out of the whole spectrum of news out there.

The very goal of trying to satisfy the greatest number of readers while keeping an often undisclosed political and business agenda will give enormous competitive advantage to new independent content sources which have built their following on deep trust, full disclosure and opinionated dedication to a very specific topic, issue.

As demand for quality, topic-specific news and information becomes the real of every individual and not just of those operating in the stock market, a universe of opportunities for monetizing high-quality and high-value topic-specific information will likely appear.

The fact alone that there is such a fast-growing universe of content curation tools becoming available, and that many of these are not free, should indicate that there is a fast growing need for these type of solutions and that there publishers and companies willing to pay for them.

Often those who are discovering the idea of news and content curation for the first time, see only the aspect of automatic aggregation, filtering and republication of content headlines and excerpts coming from other sources as being the revolutionary idea. The benefit they see right away is represented by the idea of sitting back and having great content published on their site on auto-pilot.

In fact, while this is indeed a possible true and tangible benefit (and tools are getting much better at doing this, almost unassisted), there is so much greater value and business opportunities that can be reaped when, true human curation is applied, allowing information and resources that were disconnected and hard to find, to become part of a story, collection, toolkit, report or guide.

2) Key Business Drivers for Real-Time News and Content Curation

1) Too Much Information

There is too much information out there and to find what is relevant to one's interest it takes more and more effort.

"The time it takes to follow and go through multiple web sites and blogs takes tangible time, and since most sources publish or give coverage to more than one topic, one gets to browse and scan through lots of useless content just for the sake of finding what is relevant to his specific interest.

Even in the case of power-users utilizing RSS feed readers, aggregators and filters, the amount of junk we have to sift through daily is nothing but impressive, so much so, that those who have enough time and skills to pick the gems from that ocean of tweets, social media posts and blog posts, enjoy a fast increasing reputation and visibility online."

"No matter whether you see it as " information overload" or " filter failure" the key fact here is that there is so much information being produced out there, that it is next to impossible to follow or keep up with just about any specific topic, without spending considerable amounts of time looking at irrelevant stuff.

That is the the essence.

To make the issue even more frustrating, no matter how much junk you go through, you may still be missing on some important news story or product announcement just because there are so many sources to look up and it becomes physically impossible to scan them all.

There is indeed much more food than we can chew.

And so, we start relying on a few trusted sources to do the heavy lifting for us, and to bring back to us what we really need not to be missing."

Real-Time News Curation: Why We Need It

2) People Trust Their Friends More Than Big Name Journalists

Distrust in mainstream media reporting has been a key characterizing trait of this past decade, as the majority of traditional publishers and reporters have failed to adapt to the new information ecosystem generated by the Internet and to the need from people to want to dig, quuestion and even interact and contribute with those who make the stories. And with the rise of independent media in the form of blogs, RSS feeds and new small independent publishers, individuals craving for higher quality information have started searching and digging the news sources themselves, becoming in their own personal universe, personal curators and editors of their own news.

Since the year 2000 social media technologies have given the opportunity to these active news consumers and reporters, to become also sharers-publishers of their curated discoveries, and in this way, some of them have gradually become highly trusted and relevant information sources for those sharing their same interests. Robert Scoble, for those who follow new technologies is great example of this. And this is why a growing number of people trusts more their "expert" online friends, than the popular media sources.

"There is value in content, and there is value in aggregation, but there is limited value in providing the two together.

The value that I get from the 'aggregator' publications that I follow is rarely to do with their content and mostly to do with their aggregation - i.e. with their links.

When they write too much content they are not giving me value - they are wasting my time.

By 'aggregating the aggregators' Google would not just be doing its users a favour. It would also help reward original content creators. Yes, mainstream media may stand to benefit from this, and if so that is their due (and yes, some pay-walls would get money from this). But it would also benefit anyone with something genuinely interesting to say.

As to those who have nothing to say but lots to aggregate, I say two things: First, you started this, so you can't complain about being aggregated away. Second, as far as I'm concerned, you have little to worry about. My loyalty is to you, not to content creators, and this is worth money.

You can show me advertisements, invite me to events and tell me about jobs. You can do this better than anyone because good aggregation is a great way of reaching a professional niche.

Just don't think it's about your content. It's not that sort of relationship.

In fact, take it out, make me happier and save some costs."

Nico Flores - A Feature Request for Google Reader: Aggregate the Aggregators

3) Curators Add Value and Provide a Key Competitive Advantage

"I’m one of those who argue for the higher value of editors.

My reasoning is simple: Online news is a competitive business.

Given competition, readers will choose between news sources based on perspective, voice, and quality. It is editors that craft and maintain voice and quality. Thus, they (as curators), will form the core of a news source’s competitive advantage.

Good writers are necessary but not sufficient. Their work cannot be distinguished in a sea of searchable articles without the handiwork of a good curator.

On the other hand, as we’ve seen from numerous examples of “curated” link lists, aggregated news services, (HuffingtonPost…), etc. a good curator can build a competitive advantage even without on-staff writers.

Thus, curators seem to be both necessary and sufficient to build competitive advantage."

Bob Wyman - Comment on No News is No News

4) People Want True Stories, Straight From The Source

People would like to hear and see more stories coming straight form the source, without too much editorial intervention to package in ways to make it interesting and digestible for everyone. But to get deep into content and straight to the sources you need to bypass mainstream media and find the gems of reporting and insight that float inside social networks, research papers, collaborative wikis and blogs. It is in this space that there is opportunity for those news explorers that know how to move into the information jungle to bring back only valuable gems and memorable stories.

5) People Don't Care Who Has Written It or Where It Sits

People want good, valuable, selected information. They don't care who has written it or where it comes from.

"The big elephant in the room with publishers, in my opinion, is how long do they hold onto their own content and their own audience, versus this consumer demand for, ‘I don’t really care where it came from as long as you can tell me where it came from and that it’s credible...’"

Will Hunsinger - CEO Evri - How Publishers Curate World Content

6) News Information Has Become a Commodity

"General interest news is like the tip of an iceberg, something that any online news producer can match. This brings gradually the general interest news production value to near zero, as it approximates becoming a full commodity.

That is why general interest news cannot and should not be monetized. Rather it should be used to build visibility, exposure and to build additional revenue via advertising approaches."

Bill Densmore - What exactly is newspaper premium content? That's not the point

7) There Is Strong Demand for Specific, Niche Information

People want to know. But they want to evaluate, question and decide on their own. Finding something on Google is easy, but finding an answer to a topic, a doubt or an interest requires a different level of information support. Whether you are thinking about individuals needing expert curated information and advice on health, or professional ice-skating it makes little difference. The demand is now for those who can provide organized access to all of the valuable information that is out there, and not just to their personal reporting and commentary.

8) Learning Demand

There is a growing number of jobs in which the ability to stay up-to-date with industry developments, new legislation, new tools, new business opportunities dos make the difference between those who succeed and those who do not.

9) Beyond News To Information Bundles That Are Useful, Valuable, Applicable

"News has become grist for an array of increasingly personalized and targeted services. What’s the value of grist - flour - compared to a baked good?

The services we sell have to be more than the grist, although the grist is an essential ingredient. We can’t sell grist; we have to sell the baked goods."

10) Exposure Visibility Authority

A high quality thematic, topic-specific newsfeed that covers the niche or the industry in which a company operates provides prominence, visibility, exposure, prestige allowing it even to become gradually an "authority" in that field.

I mean, if a company is able to produce news feeds that are the best resources on the specific "vertical" it curates, no matter which technology, tool or process they use to achieve this, not only it achieves the above goals, including extra organic visibility in the search engines and a higher linkup rate from outside sources, but it also gradually becomes an information authority.

By creating complementary services and content areas around this specific vertical interest area, such as grassroots commentary, opinion, forums, live events or conferences, which all build on top of the content created by this curated content channel, then there is all the opportunity to naturally become the authority, the point of reference for others to go within that field of interest.

4) Business Applications: The News

What will newspapers and magazines do with the new opportunities that news and content curation offer?

Will the newsroom of the future change to make space for curators too?

"...many "reporters" today don't really do what is described as reporting...

That is, they often do try to take wire copy or stories that were written elsewhere, and go through the wasted process of "re-reporting" them just to pretend it's a new and unique story for that publication.

In many ways, this is a waste of resources. What would be better is if they actually encouraged #3 above -- let a "curator" handle that sort of news."

The Role Of Curation In Journalism

Gerd Leonhard - Future of news - The Importance of Curation

Duration: 1':4''

The Newsroom of The Future

- Reporters (Journalists + bloggers): they don’t "cover" news, they don’t replicate press agencies wires, they bring original stories. They go on the real or virtual ground. They publish with a large array of rhythms: live tweeting, articles, videos, data, in-depth investigation... They can also manage a community of bloggers / users with whom they can co-produce the news.

- Curators (journalists + amateurs) : they "cover" the news by sorting, verifying and editing live everything good existing on the web and in the media. They make link journalism, they make the news more accessible.

- Columnists (bloggers, journalists, experts): they start conversations and give stories another perspective.

Towards the Google Newsroom - A Revolution for Media

"The new model for news curation and selection, I feel, will be a balance of professional editing and collaborative news filtering.

In one incarnation, news organizations will look at feeds from highly respected news fans, and that will drive stories that are featured more prominently."

Craig Newmark - A Nerd's Take On The Future Of News Media

Other likely business uses of news curation work will be in:

• Business intelligence
• Competitive analysis
• Professional updates
• Trend spotting

I foresee the rise of editorial brands.

"Curated channels" will vie for popularity instead of individual blogs.

People will pay a premium if they trust they're being directed to the right stuff.

Comment by Jay Cross on The Birth of the Newsmaster - MasterNewMedia (2004)

Other Business Application Examples

1) Organizedwisdom.com - Expert Curators

OrganizedWisdom is a new service which taps into the knowledge of its expert curators
to provide valuable information, news and insight specifically interested in health issues.

You can read in more detail the strategy and business model of OrganizedWisdom right here:

http://organizedwisdom.com/OrganizedWisdom:About

2) Seth Godin talks about the content curation business application Squidoo

Duration: 2':43"

3) Tip of the iceberg vs. deep news

"Consider legal news…

There is a massive tip of the iceberg market for general interest news about major cases (O.J. Simpson, various rapes, etc.) but, there is a vibrant market (satisfied by organizations like the Bureau of National Affairs, Commerce Clearinghouse, etc.) that sells news about the law to folk in the business of law.

In the pharmaceutical business, a good story on Viagra is always fun in the realm of “tip of the iceberg," but there are also a variety of specialist publishers who crank out dozens of stories every day to a small but well paying audience.

The same market division applies whether you’re talking about pork bellies, the computer business, or State House politics.

You monetize “tip of the iceberg” with advertising, you monetize the deep-news market with premium pricing for access, conference attendance, lectures, newsletters, alerts, specialized books, annual reviews, etc."

Mike Shatzkin - Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change

4) George Siemens: The Business Value and Role Of The Newsmaster / News Curator Model

Duration: 6':27"

5) Business Directions / Future Trends

a) Making sense - Story-Telling - Showing the Big Picture

The name of the game when it comes to the future of consuming information is "making sense". We do not lack information, sources, variety, differing viewpoints and unmediated reports. They are all available out there. But they are difficult to get to, and we are just starting to learn how to bring together, organize and present this "organic" bundles of information in an effective way. Search engines, though in a perfect position to play a role into this, are not yet equipped to help us out. This is where news and content curators come into play, by finding, aggregating and bringing together rare and valuable pieces of content, while organizing and juxtaposing them in ways that help tell a story we can understand. Sense-makers: this is what curators are. And, as readers increasingly demand the “whole picture” on a subject, we will need more people, tools and services to help us take on effectively this challenging task.

b) Niche Info From Trusted Sources

What an increasing number of people want today is "quality information, news and resources" on very specific topics from a handful of highly trusted, opinionated, human sources. Trust in "industry" "trade publications" has been sliding away on and off-line as people have been increasingly losing trust in the brands reporting and being reported, for an evident lack of transparency and disclosure of the commercial terms over which much such publications decided what to cover or not. People prefer to get the special-interest news they are highly interested in from people they trust and respect and with whom they can feel they could have a direct line of communication and exchange.

c) Visual Curation

Making sense of things, on whichever topic you are confronted with, requires looking at different pieces of information, viewpoints, data. Recounting, summarizing, explaining and illustrating this rich information texture, by using only lineat text, can be highly limiting. News and content curators will need to rely heavily on tools that help them "summarize", "index", and provide a "bird's eye view" on a topic, before diving into the specifics of it. In this light visual communication, mapping and diagramming tools will likely play a very important role both in helping newsmasters organize and layout their content but also in giving them new and powerfrul ways to illustrate it effectively to their audiences.

d) Topic-Specific / Highly Vertical Interests

"Publishers will start to produce curated, topical or thematic content “feeds” for their target audiences. For example, consumers will be able to subscribe to curated sports feeds for the latest news about their favorite teams or athletes or gadget feeds covering digital cameras or iPad news.

Publishers will also offer more engaging (and valued) user experiences for consumers who “opt-in” to these personalized, filtered feeds providing convenient updates wherever consumers go. Think a better version of Google Alerts — curated by skilled editors from your favorite publisher and available anywhere (Facebook, Twitter, MyYahoo, iPad, iPhone etc.)."

Matthew Kumin / GigaOM - The Web of Intent is Coming (Sooner Than You Think)

e) Location Specific

News channels in the future will also be location specific, allowing readers to subscribe to the news streams that really match their specific interest based on the location they are at.

f) Collaborative Filtering and Sharing

Curation is a complex, multidisciplinary challenge, requiring much time, patience and special skills. Identifying sources, selecting and editing content, finding relevant images, crediting and referencing, are just a few of the many tasks a news curator needs to carry out. The opportunity for multiple subject-matter experts to collaborate on curating a specific news channel, issue, topic or event can certainly provide additional value and quality. Given the emerging features of curation services supporting small curation teams and the widespread availability of online collaboration tools it is only a matter of time before such opportunity becomes a necessity for pubishers and a valuable opportunity for marketers, advertisers and companies alike.

g) User Personalization

Consumers will be able to customize these feeds across topics or stories, prioritize sources, receive recommendations and discover new content via their friends and social graph. New forms of social sharing (community) will emerge organized around consumer’s interests and the curated feeds they subscribe to."

Matthew Kumin / GigaOM - The Web of Intent is Coming (Sooner Than You Think)

h) Capturing and Preserving Unique Events and Interactions

Another emerging trend is the one of capturing and preserving the multi-dimensional content, information, images and other media being generated and exchanged during a live event. Preserving and curating the universe of artifacts emerging from any unique event is certainly a way to create evergreen content value and more opportunities for business around the event.

i) The Curation is the Branding

"Newspapers are obviously aggregators and curators. The differences in their curation create their brand. The New York Times leaves out the comics. The New York Post leaves out the multi-syllable words. The Daily News beefs up its sports section and, for years, was known for having the best pictures.

But one thing has been common to all of them and to all other newspapers: they cover the waterfront. (I have called that being “horizontal.”) They aggregate news of the world, the nation, and the city with sports, weather, stock quotes, advice to the lovelorn, and many other things.

They sell almost all their advertising against the aggregate and against the brand, not against any specific item or interest being aggregated. And the competition for each paper is against other curated aggregates.

Newspapers can sell the curated aggregate to people who don’t want most of it because the total price is a good deal for the parts they want, just like the album was a good deal even if you only liked some of the songs. Or they could.

But now they are suffering precisely the same fate as the record album. The unit of appreciation is smaller than the whole. And for each unit of appreciation — each ball score, stock price, report from Washington, or political cartoon — there is a whole host of new competition.

So the long story short on newspapers is this: a business model of selling a horizontal (many-subject) aggregate, curated by something other than subject, was based on the economics of a physical world where aggregation produced efficiencies of production and distribution.

The Internet changed that.

It is no longer necessary for an aggregator to provide news to deliver me sports, or to provide a whole newspaper to deliver me the weather or a stock quote.

Horizontal aggregation was more efficient in a world of physical delivery.

Vertical aggregation makes more sense in a world of digital delivery.

And enabling the customer or user to have some control over the curation is possible in the digital world but hardly is in the physical."

Mike Shatzkin - Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change

j) From General to Specific - Niche - Vertical

From generalist, a bit-of-everything type of news coverage that we have seen spreading from mainstream to tech blogs and aggregators, to specific, vertical, niche news channels, hubs and feeds. General interest news it's a commodity and can be found anywhere. It's value added contribution is rapidly decreasing, as any individual can now get his personalized general interest news load straight from his curated set of sources inside his custom start page, Google reader and through his different social media channels (Facebook and Twitter mainly).

k) The Curator Is The New Producer-Distributor

The emerging curator / newsmaster is in fact the new producer-distributor of content as, in an fast growing ocean of content, it is the curator that gives valuable content proper visibility, reference and context. Not search engines (at least so far).

l) Greater Open-Mindedness Toward Letting Content Be Shared and Re-Distributed

"What is needed... for professional news organizations to succeed in online content licensing is a system that encourages the distribution of their content through the most efficient and popular channels available at any given moment.

Instead of fighting your audience, empower and encourage your audiences to be distributors of your content - and help them to profit from it as well."

"...the news of today - and tomorrow - needs to collect the best content from whatever source..."

"You can have some exclusive content, to be sure, but exclusivity alone cannot power success. This can be seen clearly in how information providers in the financial industry are required to aggregate content from as many different sources as possible to help information-hungry decision makers."

John Blossom - http://www.masternewmedia.org/online-news-content-and-distribution-strategies-content-curation-and-user-syndication-are-next/

m) Building Passionate Communities Around Specific Interests

As individuals learn and find new ways to match up people having great affinities with their interests and passions thrugh social media, opportunities for creating vertical content communities around very specific interest will grow exponentially. While this is a long established trend online, curation and curators may bring the efficiency, order and organization that often gets highly diluted inside existing community hubs and forums.
"Curation is about matching context and content to the right audience."
http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/01/20/video-vortex-curating-online-video/

n) Scaling Oneself With Curation

For many small and medium-sized online publishers the rush against a growing competition of content producers has become a nightmare. Producing quality content is very expensive and time consuming and competing in terms of quantity, coverage and breadth with new and existing publishers has become a losing battle. For those who have mastered the blogging paradigm, or those who have the ability to produce quality content, reviews and analysis, curation offers the opportunity to "scale operations and content quality up".

Scaling operations up means transforming your online publising role from one of exclusive contributor and content writer to the one of an aggregator/filter/selector of the best news/content coming from anywhere and serving a very specific audience/target/interest..

“For those that claim that mainstream media brands and content can’t be matched by the long tail, they misunderstand the point and purpose of personal publishing and storytelling.

The impulse (and the outcome) is not to replace polished, professional and well told stories.

The point is that people trust their friends more than they trust journalists or companies.

The point is that today, you can get your news directly from the person living the incident.

The point is that there is a hunger for authentic first hand accounts, niche subject matter and opinion.”

Chris Saad - Essay: Real-Time Storytelling

o) Active Engagement

"Publishers will also offer more engaging (and valued) user experiences for consumers who “opt-in” to these personalized, filtered feeds providing convenient updates wherever consumers go. Think a better version of Google Alerts - curated by skilled editors from your favorite publisher and available anywhere (Facebook, Twitter, MyYahoo, iPad, iPhone etc.).

Matthew Kumin / GigaOM - The Web of Intent is Coming (Sooner Than You Think)

6) Curation Business Models

Which are the business models that can be applied to the real-time news curation universe? How are existing services and vendors in this industry monetizing their offerings?

Here a few leads:

a) Charging for Curation Services and Tools
Many of the news and content curation tools available, charge a tangible fee, monthly subscrition to give you access to their offerings. So, it seems clear, by simply looking at the number of tools and curation services and at their monetization strategy that many of these companies do believe that there is a strong and growing demand for these tools and that the benefits that auto-aggregation, filtering and republication of quality selected content can provide, at least for certain companies, be worth thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars per year.

b) Branded Curation
None of the existing content curation services leverages yet the power of quality niche curation channels to sell high-quality and highly-contextual sponsorship for those channels. That was the original idea behind Seth Godin's Squidooo, but its implementation (with Google AdSense) leaves in my humble opinion lots to be desired.

c) It's Not Just About Curating Content - Curating High-Value Lists of People
Curating list of high-quality, trusted and influential authorities in specific niche verticals will be increasingly worth a bunch. Such lists will have a growing demand from both people passionate about that specific topic as well as by those companies and organizations who want to gain visibility and exposure in a vertical and want to know who are the influential people in that space to follow.

d) Value-Added Complementary Services
The opportunity here is in building value-added services, communities of interest and practices around specific vertical news channels.

"...The former news industry is now competing for the attention of users . . . of citizens . . . to be the most sophisticated "information valet" in their lives. If you save time, provide the best insight, help the user to do their job better or live their life more fully, you get their attention.

Again, noting Crosbie Fitch -- the service is a performance.

If you perform well, you may be paid, by subscription, by click, or perhaps by advertisers who are pleased you have presented to them the attention of your users."

Bill Densmore - What is exactly newspaper Premium content? That's not the point

e) Need for Vertical Focus - Aggregation and Curation
There is a huge number of vertical interest niches that will need to be supported and served in the future as publishers, aggregators and curators start to realize their value and design their own solutions. SmartBrief is the best example of the power and potential of such type of business at work. Give a look at what this company is doing and you will get a much better idea of where we are headed with this.

"The ideas of “premium” and “General Interest” are incompatible. “General Interest” implies a large market and that alone ensures that competition will eliminate opportunities for premium pricing.

In the past, newspapers exploited geographic monopolies that allowed them to charge for delivering General Interest news. But, the Internet has eliminated barriers to entry into the business of delivering news…

Nonetheless, an organization that publishes General Interest news can still do a great business by also selling premium content… (Just not General Interest content.)

The issue is in how you structure the organization and how you view the structure of the market for information.

The key thing to understand is that “General Interest” really means “tip of the iceberg”…

Now, pick any industry, or any kind of “interest” in your community and you’ll see that there is a large market for “tip of the iceberg” news that will be free and there is a layering of additional markets that get progressively smaller but require more and more content and greater and greater expertise to satisfy.

Each of these markets can be a distinct source of revenue."

Steve Outing - So What Is Exactly Newspaper Web Premium Content

"What we need is an "unwalled garden," in which users are free to choose from an array of service providers, all of whom operate across a common platform, giving access to unique bundles within and outside their particular "unwalled garden." And each unwalled garden needs to be hyper personalized -- to use a phrase coined by Marissa Mayer of Google.

Each of these unwalled gardens may constitute the deep-news focus advocated by Bob Wyman, in his "tip-of-the-iceberg" analogy. He says general news is the tip of an iceberg, which every news producer can match, and which is therefore now a commodity, and not of value. But the hyper personalized, niche content -- the "deep content" which my colleague Martin Langeveld notes is not even available on the web today because nobody can make money on it -- is an untapped source of value to users as part of an overall "information valet" relationship.

In 1997 and earlier, I wrote that newspapers were going to face a train wreck once fat pipes came into the home and people could go anywhere for information. Newspapers, I wrote, would need to learn how to make money referring people to information from anywhere, sharing both users, and content.

Today, that is still the challenge."

Bill Densmore - What is exactly newspaper Premium content? That's not the point

"I’ve been saying that the more horizontal is the collection, the less likely it is to work in the digital world.

But, remember this: when you are looking for reasons to explain why a winner in print media is losing on the web, it almost certainly starts with aggregation and curation and how it needs to change to be optimal in the new digital environment."

Mike Shatzkin - Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change

f) Getting Deeper into the News
Enough for the surface, light-type of news. You can get as much as you want it from all kinds of sources. What people, and especially those interested in paying to get more and better information, want the in-depth take at the stuff that interests them deeply.

"Let’s say you have a newspaper in New Jersey and you see your profits fall. What should you do?

I argue that instead of laying off most of your pharmaceutical and state house reporters, what you should be doing is hiring more of them and building a secondary revenue stream in the deep-news markets.

The way you get additional revenue is by going deeper into the news and thus deeper into the stack of news markets.

You then get your deep-news folk to bubble up to your general interest site a regular selection of the hot “tip-of-the-iceberg” stories that they cover while addressing the needs of the deep-news market.

But, don’t try to “sell” the tip-of-the-iceberg general interest news… Any attempt to do so will merely put you at a disadvantage to others who can easily enter the market.

Profit from your ability to provide deep-news and from your ability to generate general interest news as a side product of deep news.

(Note: Since you can’t build out and succeed in all areas of deep-news focus on those in which you have a particular expertise. Then, buy the “tip-of-the-iceberg” stuff from other deep-news producers. Do what you do best and link to the rest…)"

Comment by Bob Wyman on So what exactly is newspaper web ‘premium’ content? Please tell me by Steve Outing

End of Part 7 - Business Applications and Trends

Coming up next in this Complete Guide to Real-Time News Content Curation:
In Part 8 - Legal Issues and Considerations

Already published:

Part 1 - Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering and Newsradars - Why We Need It

Part 2 - Real-Time news Curation: Aggregation is Automated, Curation is Manual

Part 3 - Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 3: Types And Real-World Examples

Part 4 - Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 4: Process, Key Tasks, Workflow

Part 5 - Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 5: The Curator Attributes And Skills

Part 6 - Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 6: The Tools Universe

Originally written and "curated" by Robin Good with the editorial help of Ludovico Canali and first published on MasterNewMedia on October 20th, 2010 as "Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 7: Business Applications And Trends"

]]> 2010-10-20T14:30:20+01:00 http://www.masternewmedia.org/real-time-news-curation-the-complete-guide-part-5-the-curator-attributes-and-skills/ What skills do I need to have if I want to be an effective real-time news curator? Can I just pick the best headlines and links on my topic of interest or do I need to do know / do more? What makes a great news curator stand out from those who do automatic aggregation or from bloggers who create simple news stories lists?

Photo credit: thesuperph

In the previous parts of this Guide to Real-Time News Curation I have looked at what are the key problems giving way to the emergence of real-time news curation, at the differences between automatic aggregation and filtering and human-powered manual curation. I have also spent some time illustrating some real-world examples of both automated aggregation and human curated news content.

In Part 4 I have gone through the newsmaster workflow, the tasks and specific responsibilities and in Part 5, I am covering the key attributes, qualities and skills a successful real-time news curator must have.

To identify them I have been looking both at the experience I have gained with this practice in this last five years, as well as at the growing literature available online on this "content curation" topic.

Most people to whom I have shown, explained or illustrated the "newsmastering" workflow, as I like to call it, have missed to understand the value and potential of the curation process, by focusing too much on the technology aspect: how do you do it, where do you click, how do you publish it on your site, and so on.

In fact, while technology does play an important role in helping a curator find, aggregate, filter, curate and re-publish existing content, it is in the expertise and skills of the curator the opportunity to create meaning, make sense of disparate info and add value to a newly created "whole".

What makes a successful "newsmaster" is therefore not the ability to maneveur freely with RSS feeds, aggregators and PHP includes, or having access to the latest content curation technology, but rather the level of passion and depth of interest for a specific subject matter, and the harmonious and coordinated application of a rare and multidisciplinary skillset. Something, I would hope, that will be soon taught in professional journalism and communication schools.

Therefore, if you have been wondering what are the specific skills and attributes a real-time news curator must have, I have devoted this section of the guide, to this very specific topic.

Here is what I have discovered:

]]> What skills do I need to have if I want to be an effective real-time news curator? Can I just pick the best headlines and links on my topic of interest or do I need to do know / do more? What makes a great news curator stand out from those who do automatic aggregation or from bloggers who create simple news stories lists?

Photo credit: thesuperph

In the previous parts of this Guide to Real-Time News Curation I have looked at what are the key problems giving way to the emergence of real-time news curation, at the differences between automatic aggregation and filtering and human-powered manual curation. I have also spent some time illustrating some real-world examples of both automated aggregation and human curated news content.

In Part 4 I have gone through the newsmaster workflow, the tasks and specific responsibilities and in Part 5, I am covering the key attributes, qualities and skills a successful real-time news curator must have.

To identify them I have been looking both at the experience I have gained with this practice in this last five years, as well as at the growing literature available online on this "content curation" topic.

Most people to whom I have shown, explained or illustrated the "newsmastering" workflow, as I like to call it, have missed to understand the value and potential of the curation process, by focusing too much on the technology aspect: how do you do it, where do you click, how do you publish it on your site, and so on.

In fact, while technology does play an important role in helping a curator find, aggregate, filter, curate and re-publish existing content, it is in the expertise and skills of the curator the opportunity to create meaning, make sense of disparate info and add value to a newly created "whole".

What makes a successful "newsmaster" is therefore not the ability to maneveur freely with RSS feeds, aggregators and PHP includes, or having access to the latest content curation technology, but rather the level of passion and depth of interest for a specific subject matter, and the harmonious and coordinated application of a rare and multidisciplinary skillset. Something, I would hope, that will be soon taught in professional journalism and communication schools.

Therefore, if you have been wondering what are the specific skills and attributes a real-time news curator must have, I have devoted this section of the guide, to this very specific topic.

Here is what I have discovered:

Key Attributes - Qualities of a Real-Time News Curator

There are some general attributes and qualities a real-time news curator must possess to carry out his topic-specific distilling and refining in a successful way. I personally deem these attributes to be unavoidable, irreplaceable knowledge assets without which the newsmaster work is basically value-less.

1) Subject Matter Expertise

The most important one of these attributes, is undoubtedly, subject matter expertise. Unless you are deeply passionate about something it is next to impossible to become a valid curator for others. As you need to source, pick and select the most relevant stories on a specific topic, how can you do this unless you have been following closely and systematically the area?

It is also true, that there more than a few great individuals who have become "experts" in certain areas, specifically by way of curating information and news for that field for a consistent amount of time. That is: by researching and constantly investigating, monitoring and tracking most everything that is happening in a certain field, you naturally become an "expert" in that area.

Experience and familiarity with a specific topic, makes it much easier to rapidly identify sources, influencers, to understand industry jargon, technical terms and to be well informed on the general industry expectations, fears, and emerging trends. All these are such vital and irreplaceable information assets for any would-be newsmaster, that anyone attempting to shortcut or bypass the personal development of these attributes would find himself in serious difficulty when attempting to become a "trusted" news source or information advisor.

Source Familiarity - Good connections network

"If you really want to learn a body of knowledge or skills (or whatever other learning area you define), it is really hard to beat becoming a curator for that area.

In a sense, this is what academics have always done.

They focus in on a particular discipline and spend their lives researching, writing about, and (less and less) teaching it.

The good curator does much the same, though typically in a less formal way and with no promise of tenure. (The only "job security" for a curator is in continually providing high value to the learning community.)"

Jeff Cobb - Mission to Learn

2) Relevance

Subject matter expertise by itself is not sufficient to provide relevance. It would be like saying that a university professor would be the best type of professional to be a real-time news curator, while in fact it is well known, that until now, academia has often remained too detached, uninvolved and closed to become a reference point for understanding a sector, trends and emerging new ideas on a specific topic. There have been exceptions yes, but in general, academia does not get its hands dirty enough with real-world business, new ideas and information to be able to sense and "tell the pulse" of anyone industry.

Relevance, as I think of it, is the result of subject matter expertise coupled with a very good understanding of the audience one is trying to serve. Only by knowing, or rather, by selecting a priori, a very specific audience interest, problem or need, the news curator can then proceed to source, aggregate, pick and select the most relevant stories to satisfy it.

How can you be relevant if there is a loose, weak link between your audience specific interest and the type of news stories you bring back to them?

3) Trust

Trust is a result of subject matter expertise and consistent, repeated relevance. If you are very knowledgeable at something I am interested in, and you repeatedly provide me with very valuable news stories, links and resources that I didn't know anything about, you immediately gain lots of personal trust for me. Not general trust in you as a person, but specific trust in you as an expert reporter in that specific subject matter area.

Trust can be gained therefore only by first understanding / identifying a specific content / theme connected to a precise problem - interest - need and then by virtue of personal subject matter expertise by scouting, finding, curating and distributing high-value news channels, resources, collections, maps or other forms of curated content.

Trust can be further expanded over time by gaining the visibility, attention and respect of other existing curators and subject matter experts in the same field.

Key Skills Required For a Real-Time News Curator - Newsmaster

New Skills To Be Learned

[...] journalists need to learn better curatorial skills.

Yes, in a sense, they’ve always curated information, collecting it, selecting it, giving it context in their stories. But now they have to do that across a much vaster universe: the internet.

I hear all the time about the supposed problem of too much information online. Wherever you see a problem, I advise, seek the opportunity in it.

There is a need to curate the best of that information (and even the people who gather it). We have many automated means to aggregate news... Curation is a step above that, human selection. It’s a way to add value.

Jeff Jarvis - The Death of the Curator, Long Live the Curator

1. Online Re-Search Skills
2. New Media Literacy Skills
3. Communication Skills
4. Editorial Skills
5. Semantic Skills
6. Social Skills
7. Information Librarian Skills
8. Technical Skills

1) Online Re-Search Skills

a) Resource Identification

Searching and identifying key reliable sources of news. These can include both individual blogs or news sites as well as sets of highly-focused persistent search queries + complex filtering formulas on specific subjects, topics, keywords, places, people.

b) Online Search

Creating advanced search queries in any major web content domain (news, real-time, blogs, directories, etc. ) Being familiar with Boolean operators. Knowing how to create "persistent searches". Having familiarity with filtering "variables" available inside search engines. Familiarity with the use of exclusion filters based on keywords, keyphrases, date, language, and more. Query formulation at different levels and on different content bases.

2) New Media Literacy Skills

a) Crap detection

Detecting and recognizing valuable information from crap, spam, artificially created content, political and business propaganda, and paid-for editorial promotion.

Crap detection is about how to find out if something is accurate. It is the ability “to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. "Crap detection," as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before”. Crap detection is very much about "learning to ask more questions" and understanding "what are the key questions to ask" when wanting to verify information trustworthiness. The ability to work like an information detective.

Howard Rheingold on Crap Detection

b) Online Collaboration

Making oneself acquainted and fluent in the use of real-time collaboration tools such as Skype, Google Docs, screen-sharing and mind mapping tools. Developing a growing network of personal sources and contributors that can help improve the quality and coverage of a curated channel as well as its distribution and visibility.

3) Communication Skills

a) Copywriting

Writing quality text, storytelling, reporting, reviewing, interviewing. Knowing how to write to explain and illustrate. Developing a rich and qualified vocabulary within the subject matter field.

b) Presentation

Presenting information in the most effective, legible and understandable way. Having some familiarity with basic design, layout, presentation and information design aspects can help a great deal in going beyond the disorganized and unformatted approach that most blog-based curators have.

c) Visualization

Communicating stories and news by leveraging visual communication solutions. The ability to organize, present and communicate messages effectively through visual communication means.

d) Listening

Having active open ears on multiple social platforms, blogs and news channels. Listening and reacting to comments, suggestions and feedback from readers. Treasuring insights from others. Ability to understand further what kind of more specific information your community trusts and loves receiving from you.

e) Marketing Communication

Knowing in depth, the audience and profile of the community of interest being served. Adapting, customizing and tailoring messages, language and vocabulary to suit as much as possible the one of those to whom this information is being provided to.

f) Being unique

Having a personal, unique editorial "voice" and character. Selecting only exclusive, high-quality, high-value content and not signing up for anything less. Going for a specific niche and a precise audience interest.

4) Editorial Skills

a) Selecting

Choosing individual news stories for curation. Having developed precise criteria for deciding what to include and what not. Refining and questioning those criteria on an ongoing basis. Having the ability to select on the basis of quality and relevance to the community and topic-niche being served.

"Become a sommelier. Get rid of the noise. Less is more when it comes to tweets. Don't just parrot what everyone else is tweeting or retweeting. Find your own special nuggets. Dig deeper!"

Angela Dunn - Content Curation for Twitter: How To Be a "Thought Leader DJ"

b) Contextualizing

Helping readers understand the value of a news story or collection relative to their specific interest. This can be achieved by providing context to news, streams, collections or bundles in the form of background information. Context can also be enhanced by organizing, juxtaposing, categorizing, tagging, and by covering other complementary stories and viewpoints.

"Content curation isn’t just about passing along information. Rather, it involves creating an experience for the user, telling a story from multiple perspectives and providing analysis or explanation for why you chose a particular piece of content."

Erin Kissane

c) Referencing

Extending the opportunity for more exploration and sense-making by providing explanatory links for new and technical terms which may not be easily understood. The same applies to people, places, technologies and events which may not be immediately familiar to the reader.

d) Crediting

Attributing due credit to all sources, references, authors and contributors utilized in creating a curated news radar, stream, bundle or collection. providing due credit and links back to sources cited always provides extra value to the reader, opportunity for further exploration while certifying you publicly as a trusted and credible source. The more precise and accurate crediting the more value gets created and the more credibility you bring to your work. Crediting is always win-win.

e) Summarizing

Shortening long stories. Synthesizing. Creating lists. Explaining to others in a few words what has taken others a lot of pages to be communicated.

f) Updating

Keeping the curated content always "current" and up-to-date. While this may not appear as a requirement for all curated collections, there is indeed always the opportunity for creating extra value by updating any curated collection in some way or another. Even without changing or updating the elements of the collection itself there are often numerous possibilities to update the collection with stories and information about the people, places and events which have happened around it.

5) Semantic Skills

a) Organization and Classification

Ordering news stories into relevant categories and applying to them keyword tags to facilitate findability and re-use. Adding relevant or missing metadata when needed. These are typical information-librarian skills and they do contribute to provide additional value to the simple republication of interesting stories on a topic.

b) Pattern Recognition

Spotting and recognizing information patterns leading to the breaking of important stories, trends and emerging new issues.

"Curation is all about pattern-recognition, seeing how various and diverse pieces of content fit together under the same taste umbrella or along the same narrative path, so the guiding principle has to be the sole storyteller with a strong point of view.

And the art of curation isn’t about the individual pieces of content, but about how these pieces fit together, what story they tell by being placed next to each other..."

The Art of Curation an Interview with Maria Popova from BrainPickings

c) Sense-Making

Analyzing, reading and reviewing information before publishing in order to extract and identify the key value and relevance for a specific audience. Not just republishing, but continuous, ongoing refinement and re-organization (in new meaningful ways) of what is already available. For example: There could be situations in which content that is formally covering a topic very different from the one being curated, could be well used to exemplify a model or solution, that would be valuable if transferred to the curated field of interest.

d) SEO

Understanding the value of long-tail keyword research and content niches for search engine optimization. Having familiarity with keyword analysis tools like the Google Keyword Analysis tool and similar ones. Being aware of the potential benefits and negative side-effects of search engine optimization techniques.

6) Social Skills

a) Networking - Social

Building trusted relationships with thought-leaders, influencers and subject-matter experts. Reaching out to these people and providing value, help, support and extra visibility to them in order to gain some attention from them.

b) Engagement

Interacting and responding intelligently and constructively to audience requests, feedback and suggestions may very well be one of the most valuable traits of a quality new content curator, who by the nature of things, will have him / herself to increasingly rely on other more specialized sources to be able to stay on top of the universe of information she is curating.

7) Information Library Skills

a) Preservation - Archiving

Organizing, storing and preserving curated information streams, collections, bundles and newsradars for future uses. While this may not appear to many as a compelling duty, it is in fact an increasingly pressing one, especially if your curation niche is a highly valuable and business sensitive one. In fact, intelligent preservation, archiving and classification of such curated content may well lead to create further new opportunities for such content to be re-used in many other possible ways.

"...the ability to preserve content. In the future, curators in libraries (closest similar model today would probably be special collections librarians) will not only need to make sense of the information out there but also to preserve the information for the future. How do we preserve a website? Even the Internet Archive is missing links and images that the original site had. It is also a website, itself inherently unstable."

What's a Content Curator - Comment by Gerrit

8) Technical Skills

a) RSS and Real-Time Technologies

Being familiar with search, aggregation, filtering, and content distribution tools and technologies. These would certainly include good familiarity with RSS readers and aggregators, Twitter reading and publishing technologies (such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck among others), social bookmarking and social monitoring tools, as well as some basic competence in HTML tags, the use of digital images, and traffic analytics tools.

b) Content Distribution

Setting up and configuring effective content distribution channels making your curated content available on multiple relevant social networks and other content distribution channels.

"Tools permitting – and I’m not convinced the tools are out there yet – I think good curation is about the only way that digital publishers can successfully address the threat posed by Google and the like.

To me, its about converting searchers to explorers.

Curators of good stories can create the opportunity for exploration – taking the user by the hand and leading them through a topic, rather than sending them back to Google.

This is something we began to measure and I can safely say that our stories that showed the user avenues to explore a topic dramatically outperformed our poorly curated efforts.
From the perspective of a site manager responsible for overall site profitability I can safely say that a focus on curation is the best way to convert a searcher to an explorer, which is critical to monetizing content."

Comment by Stephen Newport to Curation and Journalists as Curators

"Aggregation closely resembles a laundry list of links that are automatically generated by specific meta data (think Google News).

Curation involves someone filtering this aggregated content based on a distinct point of view about audience demographics, company brand, user experience and intended outcome.

Content curation isn’t just about passing along information. Rather, it involves creating an experience for the user, telling a story from multiple perspectives and providing analysis or explanation for why you chose a particular piece of content.

One museum curator compared curation to alchemy: When you bring together pieces of content (or museum exhibits), you transform them into something different and greater than the sum of the parts."

Mark Hanson - Curation: It's No Longer Just For Museums

Suggested Further Readings

• Retraining Wire and Feature Editors to Be Web Curators
• The Role of Curation in Journalism
• A 21st Century Newswire—Curating the Web With Links
• Content curation: A Required Skill for Digital-Era Communicators

End of Part 5 - The Skills Required

Coming up next in this Complete Guide to Real-Time News Content Curation:
In Part 6 - The Tools Universe
In Part 7 - Business Applications and Trends
In Part 8 - Legal issues

Already published:

Part 1 - Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering and Newsradars - Why We Need It

Part 2 - Real-Time news Curation: Aggregation is Automated, Curation is Manual

Part 3 - Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 3: Types And Real-World Examples

Part 4 - Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 4: Process, Key Tasks, Workflow

Originally written and "curated" by Robin Good with the editorial help of Elia Lombardi and first published on MasterNewMedia on October 6th, 2010 as "Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 5: The Curator Attributes And Skills"

Photo credits:
Subject Matter Expertise - alexsl
Relevance - WebHostingSearch
Trust - AntonBalazh
Key Skills Required For a Real-Time News Curator - Newsmaster - Wordle
Crap detection - Thomas Troy
Online Collaboration - Elena Volegzhanina
Copywriting - Alan64
Presentation - Yasuhisa
Visualization - Graça Victoria
Listening - 4FR
Marketing Communication - Kronick
Being unique - Kativ
Selecting - Elen
Contextualizing - Xiao Fang Hu
Summarizing - FreezeFrameStudio
Updating - MozillaNeokan
Organization and Classification - Neokan
Sense-Making - Sgame
SEO - MacXever
Networking - Social - Clipart
Engagement - Henk Leerssen
Preservation - Archiving - 123render
RSS and Real-Time Technologies - norebbo
Content Distribution - DN Group

Photo credit: Carl Swahn

In Part 1 of this Curation Guide I have explained the reasons why news curation has become a necessity. Part 2 was devoted to explain the difference between automatic news aggregation and human-powered manual curation. In Part 3 I have curated a visual list of both aggregated and curated news examples so that you can have a better idea of what news curation really looks like. I have also recently updated it with some visual maps to make navigation and browsing even easier.

In Part 4 of this Complete Guide to Real-Time News Curation I am presenting, what I have identified so far as being the key tasks a real-time news curator, must attend to. (I am more than interested in expanding and refining this initial list, with your kind suggestions and feedback as I like consider to consider this guide more of an ongoing work in progress rather than a definitive static reference.)

My goal with this, is one of sharing with you my own discoveries on this topic, as I truly believe that news curation offers not only a great opportunity for subject matter experts to create additional value, but also a much bigger opportunity for society as a whole Internet to start making greater sense of the uncoherent and hard-to-follow mass of information that we have are publishing online.

Here is what I have found out:

"I believe that there is a role for trusted curators of news, people who have unique access or unique insight, who can get to news more quickly than anybody else, or dive into it more deeply."

Louis Gray - The Five Stages of Filtering

"The role of journalist changes from one of content creation to one of content curation. From telling a story to curating a conversation. From finding sources to enabling people. From news organizations to news platforms. From selling ads to adding value.

The stories of our world are already being told in countless public, archivable, searchable and discoverable ways. What’s missing now is not someone to hunt stories down, but rather to weave them into a narrative. What’s missing is not the information, but the expertise to connect the dots and cut through the noise to find the meaningful and the important."

Chris Saad - Real-Time Storytelling

Which are the key tasks a real-time news curator has to be responsible for?

I have received a lot of emails from readers asking to illustrate more clearly what the actual typical tasks of a news curator are, and what are the tools that someone would need to use to carry them out.

In Part 4 and 5 of this guide I am looking specifically at both the workflow, the tasks involved as well as at the attributes, qualities and skills that a newsmaster, or real-time news curator should have.

The Real-Time News Curator Workflow

1. Identify Niche

Identify your specific topic-theme. The more specific, the better. The broader your coverage the less relevant it will be to your readers, unless you are already a very popular individual that people trust on a number od different topics. As news, information and general content keeps growing in quantity, highly curated niche news streams on specific topics-themes are what people are going to be increasingly asking for to keep themselves super-informed on the topics that matter most to them.

2. Select - Identify Sources

Search, explore and identify your initial key news sources. These may include specific news sites, blogs, RSS feeds, open persistent searches, Twitter channels, Facebook pages and more. As a matter of fact this should be an "ongoing" process, whereby such sources are periodically reviewed, refreshed and updated with new ones while vetting or filtering more accurately those too broad or noisy ones.

3. Setup Search Framework

Set-up and configure a pre-set number of searches on major search engines, Twitter and social media sites to monitor, gather and find relevant new material on your topic of interest. These searches cover the key sub-topics, people and issues that are "hot" in your selected niche. It is best to create "open persistent searches" for each one of these so that one can simply subscribe to the RSS feeds that each one of these searches generates.

4. Reach Out - Network

Reach out and network with reporters, journalists, passionate users, influencers and experts in your topic niche. Expose these people to your news curation work and see how you can provide valuable feedback and support to some of these people projects. Offer them opportunity to contribute to your curation work. Link, refer and credit them whenever possible.

5. Aggregate

Bring together all of the RSS feeds from your selected news sources and open searches into your "newsmastering" - aggregation engine and generate a "master" feed that aggregates in one stream all of the new content being published.

6. Filter

Create and apply custom filters to the incoming content feeds to eliminate junk content and other unwanted, unfitting content. Filters should be intelligently applied both to individual incoming streams/feeds as well as to the overall "master feed" to keep maximum control to exclude spam, fake articles and other low-quality content.

7. Select Stories

Choose the individual stories, pointers and reports that qualify for publication. This is a picking and selecting task that is meant to aim for few, high-quality, highly relevant and curated selections rather than large quantities of broad, uncurated ones.

8. Verify

Always verify the source of each of your selected stories and the information therein provided for accuracy. Verify key links and original authorship.

9. Edit

Edit, correct, amend. Add an intro if needed, summarize the key content being covered, review for errors and overlooks. Reference, comment.

10. Provide Context

Provide more context whenever possible by working on title and / or on the news description-intro. To provide more context in the title, identify and add a set of few keywords that specifically identify the topic-context you want to highlight. More context can also be provided by assigning each news story to a specific news group, channel, collection category or series of posts.

11. Spin

Add your own perspective, opinion, take on the information or story you are sharing and highlighting why it is relevant for your own "context" (niche, audience, interests). Spin, intended as a positive and constructive way to add your "perspective" to any information, has very high value. Spinning is often the delta between simple re-publishers / re-tweeters and a true curator - newsmaster.

12. Title

Use the title to "frame" and provide immediate context, focus and value-benefit for each of the news stories you curate. Avoid traditional journalistic approaches and catchy titles - go for the essence of the information you are presenting. Often the original title doesn't do justice to this because the story was intended for a different audience, public or framed to highlight other elements of a story. Once that content is floating out there online it is open to re-framing and re-contextualization in any possible way that other individuals see fit.

13. Credit

Provide full credit to sources, authors and contributors whenever possible. Crediting consistently helps increase trustworthiness and respect from readers, while making yourself visible to those same people you are crediting and which are likely to be the influencers in your space.

14. Sequence

Sequence your selected news stories to provide the most valuable information reading experience to your readers. Time is not always the best sequencing variable. It all depends on what you want to cover and the type of stories that you have available. For example to provide a curated news channel on a tragic event it may be better to continually re-sequence stories so that the earliest ones provide the key news info about the event as well as the best in-depth background stories, though in reality these two types of stories may come out at very different times.

15. Organize

Classify and archive your curated news stream by assigning each one to one or more specific categories or tags, so that they can be easily retrieved, found and reused for other publication purposes.

16. Update

Update periodically with new fresh content.

17. Disclose

Be upfront about your focus, mission and personal profile information. Disclose as much as this info as possible letting your readers-subscribers know what is your topic, perspective or editorial take on it and your specific background and expertise. Make commercial partnerships and sponsors you have, publicly known.

18. Syndicate

Distribute and syndicate your curated news channel (what I call a "newsradar") on relevant online channels, including social networks, aggregated news channels, your blog / newsletter / site and other content distribution channels avialble.

19. Feedback - Reply

Invite and pay attention to feedback, suggestions and contributions coming in from your subscribers, readers, followers. Integrate their best advice and give exposure and reward to those that help you find and curate information better. Create synergies and collaborate with them. Develop online distributed newsrooms on specific topics.

20. Track - monitor

Track and monitor visitors, preferences, time spent, link followed and re-distributed by your readers. Analyze data and identify trends. Improve your curation service accordingly.

21. Refine and Improve

Keep refining and improving all of these tasks, starting with the updating of the news sources from time to time up to the updating and reviewing of user feedbacks and responses. Rinse and repeat from point 1.

There are likely more tasks and elements to the news curator workflow that I have been able to identify right here. One that comes to mind is for example packaging of the curated news stream, which I think is not only an essential element, but an area in which we will see much growth in the near future.

Please feel free to suggest in the comment area, what you think should be added to this set of tasks.

Examples - Demonstrations of Curation Steps and Workflow

Storify Demo - Real-Time Curation

Eddy Real-Time News Curation - Basic Process of Real-Time News Curation

Example Visual of Steps For Twitter Curation Process With Eddy

Introducing Curata a real-time news curation engine and how it works

Personal Curation and Content Distribution Setup - Teemu Arina and Dicole Associates

Suggested Further Readings

• Mindy McAdams - ‘Curation,’ and Journalists as Curators
• Angela Dunn - Twitter Curation - Content Curation For Twitter: How To Be a "Thought Leader DJ"
• Robert Scoble - The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators
• Chris Saad - Real-Time Storytelling
• New Curator - Most Important Function of Curator
>

End of Part 4 - Process, Key Tasks, Workflow

Coming up next in this Complete Guide to Real-Time News Content Curation:
In Part 5 - The Curator Attributes And Skills
In Part 6 - The Tools Universe
In Part 7 - Business Applications and Trends
In Part 8 - Legal issues

Already published:

Part 1 - Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering and Newsradars - Why We Need It

Part 2 - Real-Time news Curation: Aggregation is Automated, Curation is Manual

Part 3 - Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 3: Types And Real-World Examples

Originally written and "curated" by Robin Good with the editorial help of Elia Lombardi and first published on MasterNewMedia on September 29th, 2010 as "Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 4: Process, Key Tasks, Workflow "

Photo credits:
1. Identify your Niche - mattjeacock
3. Setup the Search framework - chaoss
4. Reach - Network - Chris Lamphear
5. Aggregate - gudrun_anna
6. Filter - dlerick
7. Select Stories - DNY59
9. Edit - Curate - Kmitu
10. Provide Context - John Blossom
11. Spin - shapecharge
12. Title - Janaka Dharmasena
14. Sequence - jgroup
15. Organize - 3DStock
16. Update - DNY59
18. Syndicate - Leontura
19. Feedback - Reply - 3d_kot
20. Track - monitor - Vlad Susoy
21. Refine and Improve - TommL

Photo credit: dizeloid

In part III of this guide to real-time news curation (Part I and Part II) you can find a full-blown showcase of real-world examples of good content curation, from basic lists to guides and news reporting, as well as some more traditional, or I should say, more familiar, examples of automated and semi-automated news aggregation.

I am certainly not trying to build a full and comprehensive list of all examples of curated news out there, but only a showcase of the best representative references I have been able to find during my research. There are probably a lot more, and I would truly appreciate your contributions to this, via the comments area at the end of this guide.

So this is by no means an attempt to rank or highlight the best out there, but only a dutiful report of what I have found during my investigation and I am very eager to discover more great examples to expand this collection.

If you have been wondering what is the difference between aggregated news and curated news, or what good curated content looks like, look no further. Here is the most interesting stuff I have found out there:

Part III: Curation Types and Real-World Examples

There exists many types of curation, and many ways to interpret what curation really is. As I have attempted to illustrate in Part II of this guide, in my own view, aggregation is automated and it is not the same as curation. As I wrote, "aggregation is automated, curation is manual".

This does not mean that curation does not need or can do altogether away of any form of automated aggregation or social-based filtering. These are in fact fantastic and irreplaceable tools for any serious content or news curator. But just like boiling water, salt and pasta don't make for an automatic great spaghetti dish, so curation too, generates its key added value by the very intervention of a human curator.

That is, curation for me, is by definition human-based. And even if you want to stretch it and question me about different forms of automated aggregation and filtering which amount, in their results to an apparently "curated" output, I will say that:

1. Even in the case of automated aggregation or filtering there has been a human hand in strategizing the approach and in coding and implementing the specific filtering and aggregation routines.

2. There is always ample margin for improvement upon automated results as the human mind can identify certain types of patterns and see possible relationships and connections in a much more flexible way than a machine can.

3. It is not that automated aggregation and filtering mechanisms cannot produce valuable information. It is rather that the news content generated by automated mechanisms and social filters can almost always be dramatically improved, enriched, augmented and expanded in many valuable ways, by human curation.

4. I have not yet been able to find any automated or socially filtered news channel that could not be significantly improved by the addition of a human curator.

But I also do recognize I am venturing in some uncharted new grounds and I am therefore open to question and evaluate my own above viewpoints also from other perspectives.

"I believe that there is a role for trusted curators of news, people who have unique access or unique insight, who can get to news more quickly than anybody else, or dive into it more deeply.

I believe that social similarities are a good hint at an individual's interests, but they cannot replace your own preferences - which go beyond your ability to fill out a form and try to tell the truth on what it is that you really like.

The best systems, as Gmail is trying to do (with some help from your own feedback on whether they are getting it right), happen naturally and transparently in the background.

It's natural I would think this given my work with my6sense, but I have long believed in there being a perfect place for humans to act as curators and guides, while there is another perfect place for machines to provide, to the best of their ability, resources to aid your discovery.

So when you are challenged with a mountain of information coming at you from any angle, think of the best way to get it handled. Should you turn to an editor, to the will of the people, to your friends, or to code?

The options are all there, and more tools are coming to help you attack the noise - because there's little chance it will fade away any time soon - and a very strong chance it could get much worse very quickly."

Louis Gray - The Five Stages of Filtering and Relevance

Here below, I have prepared a rich visual showcase of what different real-world examples of automated aggregation, socially filtered or mediated content and fully-curated solutions look like.

Again, I am not pretending in any way to provide a fully comprehensive catalog, nor to claim any best of category awards for these selections I have made. They are simply, to the best of my limited know-how in these areas, the best and most representative examples I have been able to find so far. (I would greatly appreciate, your contributions in terms of other great examples of content aggregation, filtering and curation that you are aware of, by way of the comments area at the end of this article.)

What I am rather trying to achieve is to provide enough of a "curated" compilation of examples to help those new and interested in this topic, to better understand what the results of such different approaches look like. By "showcasing" instead of just writing about it, I want to help "illustrate" the different types of aggregation filtering and human curation that I see out there.

Types of Curation

1. Curated News Summaries and Lists of Links
Curated lists and news summaries are concentrates of information, reduced to its smallest components. Keywords and links on a specific subject or theme.

2. Curated Guides and SuperGuides
Curated guides, are curated anthologies and digests on a very specific topic or theme, created by bringing together and organizing in the best possible way, the most useful content already available on that topic.

3. Crowdsourced Automated News Aggregators - Memetrackers
Memetrackers are content and news aggregation engines generally characterized by purely automatic operation in determining the most popular links. Memetrackers key benefit is the ability to aggregate existing web content under different topics, providing therefore an easier and more efficient way to scan and search for relevant info on different subjects.

4. Automated News Aggregators
Automated news aggregators bring together news from a pre-selected set of news sources providing automatic topic, source and chronological sorting and search functions.

5. Crowdsourced Curated News Aggregators
Crowdsourced curated news aggregators invite and accept news submissions from the crowd and then publish all of them utilizing different automated criteria to sort and organize them by freshness, popularity, topic and time.

6. Curated News Channels
Curated news channels, first aggregate and filter news content utilizing automated tools of which they control the inout, aggregation and filtering variables, and then place all content through a curated editorial workflow, that sorts, organizes and picks out the most relevant stories to publish.

7. Automated Real-Time Twitter News Channels
Automated real-time Twitter news aggregation channels bring together a pre-selected number of unique sources, generally selected through a human validation process, into an organic stream which can be viewed and browsed in a number of different ways.

8. Curated Video Channels
Curated video channels first privately aggregate the best video-based content produced and published online, and then manually curate-select the most interesting and relevant clips according to an editorial theme or to a set of predetermined categories-topics.

1) Curated News Summaries and Lists of Links

Curated lists and news summaries are concentrates of information, reduced to its smallest components. Keywords and links on a specific subject or theme.

Web Developer's Handbook

A densely edited list of design resources for the advanced webmaster - web designer. Highly valued in its field.

Best Online Collaboration Tools - 2010-2011

A navigable mindmap of over 300 online collaboration tools organized by categories. This list of links is updated weekly and represent the most comprehensive reference of such tools online.

FeedMyApp

A daily list of links of new web 2.0 applications, tools and services, providing a thumbnail, a brief description and a link to the source.

Robin Good's Bookmarks

My own list of selected picks saved as online bookmarks inside Delicious.

Twitter - Most Influential In Tech

Robert Scoble's personally curated list of most influential people in technology.

Blogroll

A list of recommended sites or blogroll from the blog Share The Wealth by Chris Gupta

News Summary

A news summary with stories selected from other sites is now the prevailing format at alternative health site "Health Supreme" by Sepp Hasslberger

"Umberto Eco in an interview appearing at Spiegel Online discusses how human beings have been using lists to try and make sense of the world for quite some time. Eco states:

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature.

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often.

And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible?

Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries."

Umberto Eco - Creating Order Out of Aggregation

2) Curated Guides and SuperGuides

Curated guides, are curated anthologies and digests on a very specific topic or theme, created by bringing together and organizing in the best possible way, the most useful content already available on that topic.

SEOMoz - SEO Factors - Most Important SEO Factors

A curated guide to identify and understand the most relevant factors impacting SEO performance for a web site. The curation in this case is about gathering, editing and organizing the opinions and advices of a selected number of SEO experts on this specific matter.

RSSTop55 - Best RSS Directories and Search Engines

A continuously updated directory of the best RSS search engines and directories, contains a few hundred entries which provide a short description, links and specific advice on how to submit a site.

Smashing Magazine - 25 Useful Videos and Presentations For Designers

A curated guide to the best video clips and presentations for designers.

PCWorld - 50 Tools To Speed Up Your PC

List of software tools that can help speed up computer performance.

MasterNewMedia - The Video Encoding Guide

Guide bringing together the very best articles and information reports available online and regarding the video encoding process.

Social Media Examiner - Top 10 Facebook Pages

An annotated guide to ten of the most interesting branded Facebook pages.

Tsunami 2005 - All of The Video Clips

A multi-part curated video guide about the South-Asias Tsunami of 2005, created in the immediate afterhours of the tragic event with the goal of collecting the most relevant and interesting video clips from the event.

3) Crowdsourced Automated Aggregators - Memetrackers

Memetrackers are content and news aggregation engines generally characterized by purely automatic operation in determining the most popular links. Memetrackers key benefit is the ability to aggregate existing web content under different topics, providing therefore an easier and more efficient way to scan and search for relevant info on different subjects.

"WHEN Kevin Rose, a former host on the TechTV channel, created Digg in 2004 - before Facebook caught on and two years before Twitter’s start - the idea of a "social news" site, with content chosen by citizen-editors, was novel.

"There’s no handful of editors in a smoke-filled back room deciding which stories are important; the masses are deciding," Mr. Rose told Business 2.0 magazine in 2006."

Todd Wasserman - New York Times - Can Digg Find Its Way in the Crowd?

Digg.com

Digg collects short-form content submissions from users, summarizing and pointing to existing content articles or other resources online. The stories can be sorted by popularity, freshness or topic.

Reddit

Reddit is one of Digg main competitors and it uses a very similar approach to collect and organize user-selected content from the web.

Wikio

Wikio is a second-generation crowdsourced aggregator or memetracker, and just like its competitors collects and organizes user submissions pointing to valuable content items published online.

Yahoo Buzz

Yahoo Buzz aggregates and collects user submissions on anything from breaking stories on major news to viral videos on personal blogs. YB doesn't employ editors but utilizes the audience to receive story submissions, and to vote, comment and share published stories. By then looking at these indicators YB auto-publishes the most popular stories.

4) Automated News Aggregators

Automated news aggregators bring together news from a pre-selected set of news sources providing automatic topic, source and chronological sorting and search functions.

Google News

Google News is the "news aggregator". It brings together the latest stories from hundreds of major newspapers and qualifying sites auto-organizing them by time and topics.

Megite

Megite automatically aggregates news stories by thousands of different news sources and publishes them according to topics. It works and feel as a mix between Techmeme and Google News.

Topix

Topic-based news aggregator Topix creates context for stories around the geo-location from which you are connecting. A Top 10 online newspaper destination (comScore, March 2008), the site links news from 50,000 sources to 360,000 lively user-generated forums.

NewsNow

Newsnow is a standard automated news aggregator collecting stories form over 40,000 sources and organizing them both chronologically as well as by standard news categories.

Blogrunner - Technology

Blogrunner is a service from The New York Times that automatically monitors news articles and blog posts and tracks news events as they develop across the Web thriugh a pre-selected number of categories.

AllTop - Blogging

While it is being promoted as a curated news portal, reflecting Guy Kawasaki source picks, AllTop is basically an automated news aggregator working on a very specific small set of high-quality source sites.

Buzztap - NBA

Buzztap is a much more focused news aggregator, providing access to the latest sports buzz, culled from thousands of sources.

5) Crowdsourced Curated News Aggregators

Crowdsourced curated news aggregators invite and accept news submissions from the crowd and then publish all of them utilizing different automated criteria to sort and organize them by freshness, popularity, topic and time.

Slashdot

Slashdot accepts very-short-story submissions from readers pointing to a major breaking story online. Slashdot editors review and select manually which stories to publish and then carefully curate by moderating, vetting and rating all of the comments appearing under each story.

NowPublic

NowPublic is a multimedia online news magazine accepting user contributions for international news. Articles on the trending issues of the day are written and assembled by contributors who provide relevant background, photos, videos and Tweets needed to understand and join the digital dialogue. In addition NowPublic relies on a mini-army of reporters who file stories from 6,000 cities in 160 countries.

Newser

Newser aggregates news from thousands of sources and then utilizes its editorial team to summarize, pick and select the most thought-provoking and entertaining stories.

Spot.us

Spot.us is an open source project to pioneer “community powered reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission and participate with journalists to do reporting on important and perhaps overlooked topics. User-directed curation from beginning to end.

6) Curated News Channels

Curated news channels, first aggregate and filter news content utilizing automated tools of which they control the inout, aggregation and filtering variables, and then place all content through a curated editorial workflow, that sorts, organizes and picks out the most relevant stories to publish.

Arts & Letters Daily

Arts & Letters Daily is a list of content links updated manually six days a week by Denis Dutton and Tran Huu Dung.

The Huffington Post

The Huff is an "Internet newspaper" producing exclusive content as well as collecting, curating and rewriting into short stories the most interesting content available online.

Drudge Report

The DR is an online newspaper made up of curated links from the best news stories available online.

Poynter - Romenesko Latest News

The Romenesko Latest News page on Poynter Online is a curated magazine on media industry news, and commentary over the most interesting stories being published online.

Abnormal Returns

Abnormal Returns is a wide-ranging, forecast-free investment blog which provides news and information on financial investments. On its home page it provides a curated list of links to valuable articles and resources elsewhere online which it also provides as an RSS feed or widget for other sites to republish.

The Week - World Business

The Week is an online magazine curating the best content from around the web under a pre-defined set of categories. The week editors identify key topics being discussed online and after having read them produce high quality articles summarizing and referencing all of the best information gathered from those sources.

SmartBrief

Smartbrief is a clearinghouse for market-specific human-curated daily news reports, available both as email updates and web pages.

MarketWatch Bi-Weekly

Marketwatch is an online magazine covering trends and issues affecting the electronic industry, by curating and adding commentary the best content and news stories from other sources on the web.

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SFGate.com uses the OneSpot widget to power links to related content both inside and outside its site. “We’re curating content from the Chronicle as well as our collection of Web-only content, whether it's from the blogs or the community as well as outside sources,” said Kevin Skaggs, executive producer at SFGate.com.

Skaggs noted that newspapers have always curated content; this is just an extension of it on the Web. “Users come to us because we become the place that really packages it all together in the most interesting way,” he said.

Publishers such as The New York Times use curation tools to collect links for both widgets and blogs, using Publish2, which allows journalists to bookmark and publish links with a browser plugin.

e-Media Vitals - How Publishers Curate World Content

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Liqurious - What's your poison

Liqurious is part of the notcot mini-network of curated sites. Its focus is on visual content related to drinks.

Dicole Radar

Dicole Radar is Teemu Arina's own curated selection of the most relevant content and links coming from its company and associates. Dicole is a small Finnish company providing consulting on strategies for building online communities and for effectively leveraging the power of social media inside large brands.

MediaGazer

Mediagazer is part of the "Techmeme" family of news aggregation sites, which has combined sophisticated automated aggregation technologies with direct editorial input by employing a human-curator editor, Megan McCarthy, to pick, sort, select and organize the best breaking news on media.

WeSmirch

WeSmirch distills the lastest buzz from popular gossip blogs and news sites every five minutes. All articles are selected via computer algorithm, vividly demonstrating that computers have a very long way to go before actually accomplishing truly intelligent work.

Ballbug - MLB Buzz Bot - Baseball news

Ballbug spotlights the most buzzed-about baseball news from thousands of web sites. It auto-generates a summary page every 5 minutes, drawing on local news sites, national sports media, and baseball bloggers of various stripes.

Techmeme

"The site, developed by a former Intel engineer, appropriately enough relies on software algorithms to collect technology news in real time into what is essentially the front page of an ever-changing industry newspaper.

But Techmeme also turns to humans to filter the ever-growing number of articles and blog posts published online each day, a method that is being used by Mediagazer, a new sister site for media industry news.”

New York Times

Other interesting examples of curated news channels can be found here: (please do suggest more)

• CMO


• Social Media Informer


• B2B MarketingZone


• Real Clear Politics


• elearning Learning


• TBD Local News Washington

Examples of Brand Curated News Channels

HiveFire - GetCurata - The Content Curation eBook - Taming The Flood In B2B Social Media

Digital Curation

7) Automated Real-Time Twitter News Channels

Automated real-time Twitter news aggregation channels bring together a pre-selected number of unique sources, generally selected through a human validation process, into an organic stream which can be viewed and browsed in a number of different ways.

Tweetmeme

Championist

Muck Rack - Technology

Venture Maven

Dvlprs - Ajax

Giant Red Carpet - Actors

InkPill - Web Design

Style.com - FashionFeed

8) Curated Video Channels

Curated video channels first privately aggregate the best video-based content produced and published online, and then manually curate-select the most interesting and relevant clips according to an editorial theme or to a set of predetermined categories-topics.

Chunnel TV

Curated audio-visual content from the global underground.

Vidque

A curated topic by topic selection of the best video clips coming from YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv and TED.

Newslook

A curated selection of the best video news reporting available online.

Devour

For more great examples see also:

• Organic Development Blog - Our Top 5 Businesses that CAN-do Content Curation

In the next part of this guide to real-Time news curation, I am going to be looking at the role of the news curator, or newsmaster, and analyze in detail the workflow and steps she must take as well as the skills she needs to have to be successful at this.

End of Part 3

Coming up next in this Complete Guide to Real-Time News Content Curation:
In Part 4 - How To Do It
In Part 5 - The Curator Attributes And Skills
In Part 6 - The Tools Universe
In Part 7 - Business Applications and Trends
In Part 8 - Legal issues

Previous parts already published:

Part 1 - Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering and Newsradars - Why We Need It

Part 2 - Real-Time news Curation: Aggregation is Automated, Curation is Manual

Originally written and "curated" by Robin Good with the editorial help of Elia Lombardi and Ludovico Canali and first published on MasterNewMedia on September 22nd, 2010 as "Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 3: Types And Real-World Examples"

Photo credit: Creativaimage

Back in 2004, I wrote an article entitled: The Birth of The Newsmaster.

It was my first public realization, that a real-time news curator, which I labeled at the time a "newsmaster", was soon due.

The explosion of RSS-based information channels and my early experiments with it, led me to think that whoever, like Robert Scoble was claiming to be able to follow hundreds of thousands of news feed sources, would have had to soon question his assessments. You cannot follow and keep yourself updated in an effective way by simply subscribing to as many news sources as possible.

De facto RSS did (and does) put a large quantity of content in a sort of tacit public domain as it offers the easiest way to reuse, syndicate and aggregate formatting-free content in an unlimited number of ways.

It is in the DNA of RSS to be wanting to be free, to be further reused, personalized and syndicated.

And it was this very technical innovation, the democratization of most web content into a standardized format that anyone could subscribe and work from (RSS), that made me realize how big an opportunity there was for those with sufficient expertise, passion, analysis and research skills to become unique aggregators and intelligent news curators on specific topics of the best content available out there.

The ability to aggregate, filter and curate content coming from the most disparate sources appeared to be the key operation skills required to make this idea become reality.

I then imagined how valuable could have been the creation of specialized, focused information channels, intercepting the needs and interests of very specific niches:

• Valuable to those who want to learn and stay updated instead of being inundated with tons of content garbage and unverified news to sift through,
• valuable to those who curate and publish such channels as these provide them with the perfect means to build their own visibility, credibility, trust and authority,
• valuable to publishers and brands supporting such news publishing approach as it brings real value to their customers and helps everyone make better sense of all the news available out there.

The problem of information overload is like any other problem, one side of a new, bright opportunity. As the quantity of news and information grows by the hour, we need new means and approaches to organize and make sense of all of it.

Automated aggregation is not the solution. Human-powered, manual news curation is.

Human news curators can add more value and understanding to the news, by aggregating, filtering and curating them, than it is available in individual news stories taken by themselves.

By organizing, filtering, selecting and picking the best and most relevant information for a target community of fans / readers / customers, an online publisher can provide his audience with high-quality, unique value that will be hard to find elsewhere.

So, as I wrote six years ago, it did and it still does look to me as a renaissance of sorts is truly taking place. Understanding what this renaissance is all about and how you or your organization can best leverage it, is what this guide on real-time news curation is all about.

Here, in Part 2 of this guide, find out what are the key differences between aggregation and curation and why real-time news curation is so much better than automated aggregation when it comes to provide high-quality news and information on a specific topic.

"Anytime you hear someone talk about Google News, The Huffington Post, Gawker, blogging, aggregating, curation, and indexing as if they are the same phenomenon, ignore them. And if they attach that discussion to a set of policy recommendations, without acknowledging the full complexity of what it is people actually do when they aggregate, curate, and index information — well, then you should put your fingers in your ears and run in the other direction."

"Aggregators, curators, and indexers: There’s a difference, and it matters"
C.W. Anderson - Nielsen Journalism Lab

Part 2 - Aggregation Is Not Curation - The Human Factor

1. Aggregation is not curation
2. Filtering is not curation
3. Aggregation is Automated, Curation is Manual
4. Automated Aggregation without Curation, is mostly...
5. The Solution is in the MIX - Human Curation + Machine Aggregation
6. News Curation: What A Difference A Human Can Make

“We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.

If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read - and doing it for free - I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look.

Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links.”

Nick Bilton - NY Times

1) Aggregation Is Not Curation

Aggregating content and news from multiple sources and feeds is one, basic form of curation. The selection of news sources is per se an editorial choice, an act of curation, and in some cases it can provide good enough extra value to create value and even build services around it.

This is how news aggregation services like Google News, Techmeme, Memeorandum, and many others (which I will showcase in the next Part of this guide) have been born.

Sources are selected once and updated / vetted on a periodic basis, by a human curator or a newsmastering team, while an array of algorithm-based software programs search, aggregate and filter the incoming news stories while ranking them.

The ranking has been generally based on popularity (the number of sources picking up the specific news story), authority / trustworthiness and freshness indicators.

Techmeme, one of the most popular technology news aggregators on the web, was originally born simply as an automatic aggregation and filtering web service which required no human intervention.

Techmeme original editorial focus has been a very wide range of technology and media related news aggregated and filtered via the news service own software algorithms. Over time these have appeared to be based more on popularity (which news have more of a news chamber effect) than on originality, relevance (too broad an audience) or other inherent information quality.

To do those things, you just need a live human being to do that.

But in 2008, Gabe Rivera, Techmeme founder and CEO, officially hired a human curator, adding a subjective expert eye to the already excellent work done by its software. He later extended the human-curation support also to his other niche news hubs.

Duration: 5' 32"
Gabe Rivera of Techmeme on Why a Human Editor is Better
Video from LeWeb '08 - Paris

"Curation is the sibling of aggregation, a word that the web has know for a while. Aggregation means gathering; finding all videos with the keywords "Easter Supper" in them.

But as more devices like cell phones are used to create content (video of a hotel room, a tweet from a rock concert, an audio post from a political protest) gathering no longer adds value.

In fact, aggregation can equal aggravation.

Strangely enough, curation shifts the balance of power back to brands and publications. While anyone can make content, the decision to gather it, and present it by trusted content curators has more risk, and therefore more value."

Can Curation Save Media
Steve Rosenbuam - Business Insider

2) Automatic Filtering is not Curation

Once you start aggregating content, it does not take much time to realize that unless you apply, even some kind of basic filtering to it, you are going to drown inside it.

Duplicates, re-takes of the same news, artificially created content, spam, unverified stuff...

But thanks in particular to the power of social technologies, there exist indeed many different approaches to the automatic filtering of news content:

• Algorithmic Filtering
  exclude-include specific keywords, terms and phrases
• Filtering Based on Social Graph
  what your friends like
• Crowdsourced Filtering
  what most people like, prefer, vote
• Shared Sources Filtering (Meta)
  what people share online
• Influence Filtering
  what is shared by those who influence you the most
• Social Search
  what your connections have preferred
• Location Filtering
  where you are

Different Approaches To News Filtering

All these approaches to filtering can be automated. As they are designed to work on sets of predetermined rules they can help indeed filter out a lot of irrelevant stuff automatically.

But when it comes to organize, sort, make sense, attribute or check what is inside those stories and which ones do deserve attention, is another story.

Some of the newest real-time curation and newsmastering engines have started sporting some “intelligent” internal auto-filtering capabilities, for which I can only, at least for now (just like Kevin Marks of BT in the video above), be very skeptical.

Most of these auto-filtering capabilities are based on some of the above filtering approaches, but unless a news curator could fully edit, tweak and switch off any of these filters, it may be hard for him to be able to fully realize his mission of explorer-reporter, as some risks must be taken in order to explore new ground.

"It is also true, however, that left to its own devices, social media can lack an important, cohesive and meta narrative that creates clarity and helps the world make sense of events. While algorithms and basic filters can help, social media needs the ethics, rigor and insight of professional journalists to help tell big stories."

Chris Saad - Real-Time Storytelling

The greatest value in this editorial and curation process can be provided by the human selection capabilities. Therefore if you bypass them in favor of an algorithmic solution, you may find out that, at least in some cases, algorithms will make choices and exclusions which the news curator would have not made.

This is why, the more you leave the filtering process in the hands of the curator (within reasonable limits - in the sense that some basic automatic filtering is definitely a good thing to have) the more quality you will get in the final result.

The real-time news curator should have in his power to decide completely on which filters to use and, in my opinion, should not rely in general on automatic filtering solutions (unless he has been the one to set and define them explicitly).

Since it is difficult to define many of the variables that differentiate a good story from a bad one, as this may greatly vary depending on the niche, audience and personality doing the curation, it is in my opinion not a good idea to leave all of this power to an algorithm, or to substitute the news curator unique editorial skills with a set of software algorithms that can be bought or rented by anyone.

No matter of how good your filters are, my experience has taught me that you can make a great selection only if you put a competent, skilled "curator" at it.

The result is simply light-years better.

Noise May Actually Help Curators Do Better Filtering - The RSS Dolby

As I look back at my original vision for a curated news universe, I recall making an analogy that, while hard to grasp at the beginning, makes a lot of sense to me.

The idea is that the more "noise" there is in the news stream the easier it is to distinguish what is good and relevant from what is not.

Just like for audio, and the noise filtering technology known as Dolby, it may actually be that to make the filtering process more accurate and precise, the level of noise needs to be increased rather than decreased.

The Dolby sound system, achieves its goal through pre-emphasis, generating a cleaner, hiss-free sound, by first adding more noise to the original source and then filtering out with greater ease what appears to be the superfluous parts.

In the same way, human curators "leverage" news noise, to help themselves identify and distinguish true valuable stories from generic duplicates or retweets.

You can hear the same very concept explained by Robert Scoble (at min: 19' 30") in this excellent video interview done with Howard Rheingold on the very topic of online content curation:

Duration: 26' 49"
Robert Scoble interviewed by Howard Rheingold on Online Content Curation

In other words: News curators are the "Dolby" of the online news.

3) Aggregation is Automated, Curation is Manual

If someone tells you: "Hey Paulo, why don't you simply pull together a bunch of good feeds, from authoritative feeds in your sector, we mix them up with Yahoo! Pipes or some of the cool new tools out there, and you then slap it on your web site pages.

You get fresh content, which the search engines love, you provide fresh news for your readers and you become a leader, a trusted authority in your sector without having to add an extra task in your busy workflow or having to hire another person."

A bell should ring in your head.

After the bell has rung, a sign should appear saying:

"You always get what you pay for.

Get back to serious work, dude."

"...In 2005 it was clear to me that an ideal news aggregation site would need to combine automation with direct, hands-on editing.

...Any competent developer who tries to automate the selection of news headlines will inevitably discover that this approach always comes up a bit short.

Automation does indeed bring a lot to the table -- humans can't possibly discover and organize news as fast as computers can. But too often the lack of real intelligence leads to really unintelligent results."

Guess what? Automated news doesn't quite work.
Gabe Rivera - Techmeme

"Even giant, technically-accomplished corporations have had trouble breaking news using algorithms."

Breaking: Google News doesn’t break tech news
Eric Eldon - VentureBeat

"We have many automated means to aggregate news...

Curation is a step above that, human selection.

It’s a way to add value."

Death of the Curator, Long Live the Curator
Jeff Jarvis - Buzz Machine

"The word curation may seem to be a synonym for aggregation, but in fact it’s a double for “intelligent aggregation”.

Museum curators do not, I hope, assemble as much art as possible for an exhibition; rather they apply judgment in selecting what they deem to be appropriate."

Steve Rosenbaum
Content Curation vs. Content Aggregation - Abnormal Returns

Let me start analyzing at the basic level.

Is aggregating the stream of news from your most trusted sources equivalent to doing news curation?

Many social media enthusiasts have gone beyond simple serendipitous sharing and into “curating” or “giving coverage” to a specific, focused area of interest by republishing the aggregated streams of news of their most trusted contacts on specific topics.

Is this real-time news curation?

No.

Why?

Quantity doesn't make up for relevance.

By automatically aggregating and mixing together a group of selected feeds, you cannot really avoid excluding all of that superficial noise made up by personal messages, serendipitous commentary, unverified stories and links, spam or just generic junk content.

If you are an active social media user of platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook I am sure you have already experienced much of this in your daily news consumption activities.

If not, listen here to a few "in the know" who already have. At the last European Internet conference LeWeb in 2009, Cathy Brooks video interviewed a few expert geeks, CEOs and media journalists asking them how large a percentage of their daily social media news consumption was truly relevant. Here is what she found out:

Ouriel Ohayon of Appsfire - Duration: 2':26"

Kevin Marks of BT - Duration: 4':40"

Tony Hsieh of Zappos - Duration: 2':09"

Louis Gray - Duration: 2':40"

4) The Solution Is In The MIX - Human Curation + Machine Aggregation

“Interacting directly with an automated news engine makes it clear that the human+algorithm combo can curate news far more effectively that the individual human or algorithmic parts.”

Gabe Rivera - Techmeme

A curator is not an expert.

The expert seeks to provide the definitive answer, while the curator seeks to provide the greatest range of high value info-facts, perspectives, to allow you more leeway in constructing your own picture.

The expert is a judge... working toward restricting the view.

The curator is an explorer-reporter, working toward expanding the view.

His job is all about sense-making, organizing, illustrating and offering the best resources and viewpoints available out there.

The real-time news curator helps seeing the big picture.

“We’ve combined sophisticated automated aggregation technologies with direct editorial input from knowledgeable human editors to present the one indispensable narrative of an industry in transition.

We collect relevant takes on an issue and package them together in a comprehensive group of links.

That way, you not only get the lead opinion on an issue, but you can easily find the supporting, opposing, smart, controversial, notable, and previously unseen viewpoints.

You get the big picture.”

Introducing MediaGazer - Megan McCarthy

"...I have long believed in there being a perfect place for humans to act as curators and guides, while there is another perfect place for machines to provide, to the best of their ability, resources to aid your discovery.

So when you are challenged with a mountain of information coming at you from any angle, think of the best way to get it handled. Should you turn to an editor, to the will of the people, to your friends, or to code?

The options are all there, and more tools are coming to help you attack the noise - because there's little chance it will fade away any time soon - and a very strong chance it could get much worse very quickly."

Louis Gray

“Humans do things software cannot, like grouping subtly related stories, taking into account sarcasm or skepticism, or posting important stories that just broke.”

Techmeme Offers Tech News at Internet Speed - NY Times

The real-time news curator, doesn’t just select the good, relevant news from the rest.

The newsmaster orders, edits, re-titles, adds or re-writes introductions and synopsis, adds commentary, tags, adds images or reference links, credits and resyndicates through his own networks the most relevant news stories on the topic-theme he covers.

That’s not a small difference.

It’s the same difference between listening to a bunch of songs on the radio and having a personal DJ that spins only the type of music you REALLY like.

The human curator, beats automated mechanisms, because he can always rely on a broad set of extra resources and information channels, normally not available to a software algorithm. A human curator can tap into contacts and friends, including topic experts that he personally knows, can call in or email business companies to verify news, can follow-up on leads received via an an instant message or utilize valuable information from a print magazine article.

Those information items would never make it into an automated newsradar as I call it, or real-time news curation, newsmastering syndication tool of any kind.

This is why there is no escape from it: you have to...
“...combine sophisticated automated aggregation technologies with direct editorial curation from trusted and authoritative human editors...”

"Philosophically, I believe human editing plus automation have always been and will always be needed for top-notch aggregation. Pure automation sufficed for a few years for us, and got us to the point where we could hire more editors. But until editors arrived, Techmeme would often make questionable choices - like spotlighting too many redundant stories, keeping obsolete stories on the page, and overemphasizing odd topics only introspective bloggers care about. Also, obviously significant stories would often take much too long to appear.

In the age of Twitter and hyper competitive news bloggers, even a 15-minute delay on big news is inexcusable. Our editing helps on all these fronts: we can block the automation from posting stuff to the site, and instantly post stuff if need be."

Richard MacManus interviews Gabe Rivera
Techmeme Turns 5: Interview With Founder Gabe Rivera - ReadWriteWeb

5) Automated Aggregation Without Curation, Is Mostly...

"Hey Robin, but what about all these sites that integrate a fully automated news aggregated feed into their pages just for the sake of SEO and more frequent indexing?

It looks as an easy way to produce new fresh content, isn't that cool?"

The result of uncurated content, aggregated and filtered for the only purpose of creating new fresh content for a site, blog or brand, or to increase one's own SEO relevance can, in most cases, only be classified as spam.

That is why early news curators and aggressive marketers who have jumped on this train with the idea of having found a chicken by the golden eggs, have remained somewhat disappointed with the results.

Why?

Once again the answer remains the same: while it is easy to systematically aggregate a lot of content on just about any topic, the value of such automatically aggregated content is generally disappointing. There is not enough value in the basic aggregation and filtering.

To create a truly valuable news channel, you can rely on all the search, aggregation and filtering technologies of the world, but at the end of the line you need to put an expert, passionate curator to pick the best stories in some meaningful way.

And so if you see or hear of a company doing news curation, and all they do is assemble together a bunch of feeds and re-publish them with a cool design, you know there is an abundant margin of improvement available to them.

Automatically aggregating and republishing relevant and value-rich content feeds is not per se a despicable activity, but the type of results it produces are generally useful only in a very limited number of situations.

Say if you want to bring together all of your different content sharing activities on different sites or social networks, then it makes a lot of sense to simply aggregate and republish a bunch of RSS feeds together.

On the other hand, it is also true that on very specific topics like auctions or job offers with specific characteristics, adopting an automatic approach can in many cases work wonders. But this applies only to those situations where all information items have the same basic information structure and value types.

6) News Curation: What a Difference a Human Can Make

If at this point, you are still wondering what is the unique value that a human, news curator, can add to a news stream that has already been created by aggregating and filtering the best content and sources available out there, here is an initial list of what I think are the additional benefits that such a person can bring to the emerging new digital news publishing workflow:

1. Crap detection verifies whether a news story is trusted, and reliable.
2. Topic competence
   is an expert on the specific topic
3. Synthesis
   can effectively sythesize, summarize, title
4. Pattern detection
   sees story patterns, developments, related items
5. Commentary
   adds commentary, opinion and notes
6. Visual enrichment
   illustrates, visualizes, supports with visual data
7. Referencing
   adds links, references, resources
8. Framing
   frames and contextualizes stories according to the specific interest / audience being served
9. Organization
   juxtaposes, sorts, groups and finds relationships among different stories
10. Classification
    adds editorially relevant metadata such as tags
11. Trust building
    builds trust with audience by using personal voice, style and by being direct
12. Credit attribution
    gives appropriate credit where due
13. Topic expansion
    expands topic by uncovering related stories and information
14. Time extension
    identifies and links relevant past stories
15. Sense-making
    helps readers see the big picture, through diversity in viewpoints and sources

As you can see, there are a lot of things that a human curator can do to significantly extend the value of the basic news aggregation and filtering work done by any software.

This does not mean that real-time news curators do not need specialty, dedicated tools to be able to do this. They do, and badly so. And this is one aspect I will dwell on in detail as I will not only provide you with a full panorama of all the tools you may want to use for real-time news curation, but I will also outline what are the specific features and characteristics that the ideal real-time news curation-publishing tool should have.

My Own Curated Mini-Channel on Real-Time News Curation

End of Part 2 - Automatic Aggregation

Coming up next in this Complete Guide to Real-Time News Content Curation:
In Part 3 - Types of Curation and Real World Examples
In Part 4 - How To Do It
In Part 5 - The Curator Attributes And Skills
In Part 6 - The Tools Universe
In Part 7 - Business Applications and Trends
In Part 8 - Legal issues

Previous parts already published:

Part 1 - Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering and Newsradars - Why We Need It

Originally written and "curated" by Robin Good and first published on September 15th, 2010 on MasterNewMedia as "Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 2: Aggregation Is Not Curation"

Photo credits:
Aggregation is Automated, Curation is Manual - cinoby
Automated Aggregation Without Curation, Is Mostly... - marekuliasz
News Curation: What a Difference a Human Can Make - Choreograph

Photo credit: dsharpie and franckreporter mashed up by Robin Good

“What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about...” Ev Williams at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabs via Stowe Boyd's blog

Real-time news curation, or what I call "newsmastering", is the art of finding, aggregating, filtering, selecting, curating and republishing high-quality news stories on a very specific theme, topic, or for a particular audience interest, problem, passion.

It grows out of the need to make sense of this very need to filter and make sense of the enormous amount of information that is available out there and that keeps increasing by the hour.

Real-time news curation, is also an emerging, new online professional role, the news curator, or newsmaster in sorting, editing, enriching and picking the most relevant news and stories on specific topics-themes.

Traditional newspapers curated news content from their associated news wire agencies, affiliated news bureaus and direct reporters, to create a bit-of-everything top-down/broadcast characterized by a mass-communication approach.

In the case of real-time news curation, it is the user who selects his preferred topics and his trusted curator / newsmaster and then subscribes to it via a feed, social channel or newsletter.

As individuals become increasingly more media literate they increasingly select their personally trusted news curators on specific topics, rather than relying on the more superficial and generic information streams provided to them by traditional news channels.

Thematic and topic-specific news channels have greater affinity with the natural flow of information on the Internet. They intercept and provide valuable news information to those specifically interested in them, filtering out the junk and picking up the most relevant items.

This, I believe is the direction in which we are haded and the modality in which human beings will keep themselves updated in the near future.

If until yesterday you have relied on generalists on main TV channels and newspapers to "present" and report to you the news they got themselves from other sources, wouldn’t it be a step forward if now you could get:

a) The specific type of news you wanted

b) from those trusted ones you believe to be "in the know" in your field of interest?

That’s right; individual experts or small teams who curate topic-specific news channels by selecting the best of all the news out there on the topic they have built authority and expertise for (while disclosing and providing you with a link for each and every source).

This eight-part guide is dedicated to explaining and illustrating what these emerging news curators do, what is the difference between them and automatic aggregation, what skills and tools they require and what their future is going to look like. More specifically:

• What real-time news curation is,
• why it is going to be so relevant,
• how it came to be,
• how it is done,
• what tools and skills you need to do it,
• what are the tools and technologies needed,
• which are the existing services and tools,
• which is the ideal news curation system features set,
• what is the future going to look like.

Here is everything you need to know to understand how we are going to manage the information overload and what real-time news curation, or newsmastering, is all about.

The Problem

No matter whether you see it as "information overload" or "filter failure" the key fact here is that there is so much information being produced out there, that it is next to impossible to follow or keep up with just about any specific topic, without spending considerable amounts of time looking at irrelevant stuff.

That is the the essence.

To make the issue even more frustrating, no matter how much junk you go through, you may still be missing on some important news story or product announcement just because there are so many sources to look up and it becomes physically impossible to scan them all.

There is indeed much more food than we can chew.

Duration: 23' 51'' - Clay Shirky on the concept of "filter failure" at Web 2.0 Expo NY

And so, we start relying on a few trusted sources to do the heavy lifting for us, and to bring back to us what we really need not to be missing.

These trusted sources may be blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter channels or Facebook contacts helping you find what is more relevant.

The theory goes that by following people who have your same interests, you can learn from what they share online.

But, the theory here has gotten quickly ahead of the practice, and following such people, while it does provide the opportunity to discover some great things, and have somme good exchanges, it forces you to have to digest and wade through a much larger number of information items with little or no relevance to you.

Is that sustainable?

I don't think so.

Why?

Key Reasons Why Managing The Information Flow The Way You Have Done Until Today, Is Not Good Enough

Here some very good starters:

1. The information tsunami keeps growing daily,
2. there are new blogs, Twitter channels and news sources launching every day,
3. there is an increasing amount of personal, serendipitous, but also distracting, colloquial content
4. there is a growing amount of spam and marketing push masked as blog posts or press releases,
5. on Twitter and other social media channels, there are a large number of unverified news and stories pointing to low-quality or even missing pages,
6. it is hard for a newbie to distinguish a reliable trustable source from a marketer or spammer,
7. Crap detection is a rare skill among users and too much low-quality content sifts through unless properly checked,
8. titling and meta information is often misleading, ambiguous or just not clear enough,
9. you can’t be there always. You can't check the news 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
10. unless you have some advanced skills it may be difficult for you to find new relevant sources of information and news from the ones you know, unless they are the ones to promote them
11. relying always on the same sources tends to limit your view and awareness of other new ideas and opinions in your field of interest,
12. news stories need to be contextualized - sometimes the relevance of a story for you can only be found by reading the story and extracting something else, than the main call, from it.

Given the above, how do you go about keeping yourself updated on your specific field of interest, without wasting a lot of time by having to follow too many blogs, feeds, Twitter channels and Facebook friends who are often not talking about what you are specifically interested in?

The Natural Remedy - The Spontaneous Evolution of Online News Curation

How Did We Manage So Far? From Google to Social Media

Google News

New blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media networks. How did we manage to follow them all anyway, up until now?

In the beginning it was Google, who offered you a helping hand by playing the middle-man between your specific needs out there. "Are you searching for something? Here is a web page that can help you with this info", Google would reply.

But when it came to starting to "organize", sort and “make sense” of everything else being published online, what is happening in a certain market, or staying up-to-date on a specific topic how does Google help you achieve that?

Google News? ...hmmmm, not really.

"...In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource? One solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to personalization..." Pete Cashmore http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/03/cashmore.web.trends.2010/index.html

RSS Aggregation

And so we got into RSS. Each one becomes his own self-directed curator, by subscribing to his preferred sources and feeds and by reading what he likes best.

But that got us in more trouble.

By utilizing RSS readers - aggregators you have yes stopped the daily tour of your preferred web sites, but you have gotten into serious more trouble as now you get all of the content coming from all of those different web sites being democratized into your RSS readers and making each article, look like every other one.

The consequence is that there is now more wading through stuff that is unimportant to you than ever before.

Many of the RSS feeds you subscribe to contain a lot of personal stuff, replies and comments that add little or nothing to your craving to find out and learn more. Furthermore following many of these RSS feeds requires serious time and attention. Two personal assets that are increasingly valuable as they become scarcer and scarcer.

Topic-Based Aggregation

Further on, we have tried "thematic" or "topic-based aggregation" based on a pre-selected number of quality sources publishing content on specific topics. This type of aggregation has introduced some benefits for those wanting to get only the latest from the most popular, authority sites, in a fast and easy fashion.

Relevant examples have been the early "fully automated" Techmeme, AllTop, Topix.net and similar sites, including Google News.

All of these topic-based aggregation sites have indeed been an improvement over the original situation, and they have indeed saved us time, but at the same time also this type of solution has kept bringing in just too many unrelated things, making no effort to curate, edit, sort or group news content in any better way than the most basic one.

Persistent Searches

Even those expert publishers and newsrooms who have started utilizing RSS feeds based on "persistent searches" to scan and catch what was happening outside their well known resources, have frustratingly found out how difficult it is to obtain any kind of clean useful results.

The problem when you start aggregating content coming from unknown sources by using specific keyword searches is that, notwithstanding how many filters you use, it remains very difficult to filter out articles that are created exclusively for marketing or link building purposes, duplicate content, spam, press releases and all of this junk material which, for the most part, you don’t want to wade through.

Social Curation

Then, more recently, we have started to rely on someone else.

Our friends and network contacts. A trusted circle of blogs and online friends sharing their discoveries on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

And when those few people who have interests similar to ours are in the hundreds or thousands, the job becomes even more difficult.

Many of those you follow on Twitter or Facebook may post frequently about issues and stuff that is not directly to your specific interest. But you keep following that person, because you respect their view on something and you want to know what they say or point to when they talk about it. And by doing this we surrender to a growing flow of titles, links and posts which, to be really honest, we have zero interest for.

So not only we feel frustrated but now you need to spend even MORE TIME sifting through lots of irrelevant content, to find the few stories and resources that really interest you.

Personal Curation - Blogs

At the most basic level, bloggers represent the first generation of self-organizers of the network. If we exclude Yahoo! initial honorable effort a similar one (e.g.: ODP), there is nothing else, that comes close in scope, to what the universe of bloggers or noosphere, has been able to achieve.

Bloggers have been first to scout new independent sources, alternative voices, and who have pointed links to new ways of looking at any issue. They, more than any other group, have brought, among much useless noise, the true emergence of effective meta news sources that originate, filter and aggregate valuable content online.

So, what it appears to the many superficial onlookers as a universe of mindless writings (blogs) is nothing less than the initial phase of a complex and orderly process whereby humanity at large takes control of filtering, gathering and re-organizing his own know-how an discoveries.

Newsmasters may indeed represent the second layer of filtering that we can now apply to this ocean of content and information ...and newsmasters, as it appears, have been indeed emerging and quietly working at this nouvelle craft, for quite some time now.

(Robin Good - The Birth Of The NewsMaster: The Network Starts To Organize Itself - February 19, 2004)

Just about any online publisher who has been spending time selecting and picking out great content and resources for his readers has been doing the basic part of what is now called content curation.

Starting with the early blog times, and even before, some people have spontaneously been sharing their favorite articles or have been collecting selected resources into special lists to help those interested in those topics to make sense of that space or to keep themselves update on new discoveries and tools.

Some have started archiving these inside social bookmarking directories like Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon or Diigo, while others have started posting them to their favorite social media sites.

Now that social media has become the first publishing and communication ground for many people, serendipitous sharing of news and information has become one of the main spontaneous activities that people do on social platforms.

But even with blogs doing a great job of this, following a good bunch of them does not solve the problems we have met earlier. There is a lot of stuff that we are not interested in that we have to wade through.

Craig Newmark on editors and news curation - Duration 1':38"

Why These Basic Curation Efforts Are Not Enough

This first layer of curation, that we get out of blogs, social media and other independent sources is already something very valuable that helps each one of us organize and make better sense of all the information out there.

But still, it is a bit chaotic.

Isn't it?

Here are a few reasons to consider:

1. Content is organized in spontaneous and unexpected ways. It is not easy to know or anticipate who will curate what or when,
2. you still need to follow a lot of sources to be able to spot most of the relevant news that interest you,
3. you can't avoid having to receive some overlap of news content provided by these sources,
4. some of this content is mixed with personal content or private replies gone public,
5. all of this content is often de-contextualized and it can't be appreciated without actually going back to the source,
6. It is difficult to detect original sources from reposted, reblogged or retitled stuff,
7. credit is not always honored,
8. quality of curation ranges from simple re-sharing to valuable commentary addition, title improvement, tagging, referencing to other content and more.

The Emerging New Frontier: Real-Time News Curation / Newsmastering

Imagine instead someone or a small team that is dedicated, full-time, to scout, spot, uncover and bring back to you all of the best information, resources and new tools on a certain topic - theme and who also goes about not just verifying and checking these sources but “curates” them by titling, commenting, adding additional information and grouping them with other relevant news stories.

It is by looking at the difference between the typical part-time serendipitous curation and the dedicated work of a skilled individual or newsroom team that you can best appreciate the true difference between what has been a popular, spontaneous activity for most active online individuals, and a new emerging news publishing role which carries lots of opportunities and positive implications (I have written and referred to this role as the "newsmaster" and to its process as "newsmastering").

Some great examples of news curation at work have already become popular and highly-respected news sites and business information services, among these SmartBrief, The Drudge Report or the new, human-curated Techmeme, but I 'll have more of these models in Part 3 of this guide.

If I had to make a statement about real-time news curation, I would probably say that I see it as one of the most disruptive new emergent roles of the media professional. So much so, that I have strategized many of my business activities around this very concept.

But don't listen to me.

Here are some other voices:

In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource?

One solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to personalization.

In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter. With the launch of its Facebook Connect program, Facebook allowed sites to offer content personalization based on the preferences of your network.

Meanwhile, Google's Social Search experiment is investigating whether Web searching is improved by using information gleaned from your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and the rest. Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption, from Web links to movies, books and TV shows.

Professional "curation" has its place, too: Who better to direct our scarce attention than experts in their fields?

Pete Cashmore

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/03/cashmore.web.trends.2010/index.html

"[...] the digital realm too needs curators. Information overload makes it difficult to separate junk from art.

It requires a certain finesse and expertise - a fine tuned, perhaps trained eye.

Google, memetrackers such as Techmeme and social news sites like Digg are not curators. They're aggregators - and there's a big difference.

The call of the curator requires people who are selfless and willing to act as sherpas and guides.

They're identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts.

Digital Curators are the future of online content.

Brands, media companies and dedicated individuals can all become curators. Further, they don't even need to create their own content, just as a museum curator rarely hangs his/her own work next to a Da Vinci. They do, however, need to be subject matter experts."

Steve Rubel

http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/02/the-digital-cur.html

Let me further explain.

The solution to the ever-expanding tsunami of news and information coming at you every hour is the one of using an intermediate layer of human filters, as originally suggested by Stephen Downes, to act as collectors-hubs and topic-specific curation agents for a theoretically ever expanding universe of interests and themes.

I call such human filters and curators “newsmasters”, as their job is mainly one of finding, aggregating, selecting, editing and publishing the very best and value-rich news on a specific topic.

The deliverables newsmasters generate are “newsradars”, hand-picked stream of news on a specific theme.

A newsradar is a constantly updated thematic channel of highly relevant web references that are gathered in accordance with specific, persistent search criteria. Newsradars can focus on anything: topics, people, opinions, products, news items, events or passions. The constant updating of the channel is accomplished by leveraging the persistent-search, aggregation and filtering capabilities built-into RSS technology couple by the ongoing skilled and attentive work of a human newsmaster curator.

In other words: newsmasters are an emerging class of self-elected and professionally appointed news curators who create unique value by working exclusively on finding, aggregating, filtering and curating topic-specific news channels.

It's as simple as that.

"The mistake made by the early advocates of push - ... - lies in the idea that 'brand' will replace intelligent filtering. Brand fails because in order for something to be a brand, it must appeal to a large mass of people. But if it appeals to a large mass of people, it will invariably disappoint people looking for something more specific. The early advocates of push tried to promote existing brands, and readers found in push nothing they couldn't find in mass media."

Stephen Downes

How RSS Can Succeed - Feb. 24 2004

Let me help you now, review, see and make sense of the positive sides of news curation by summarizing for you what I see as being the key beneficial points, both for the user-reader as well as for the newsmaster in such a curated universe.

What Are The Benefits of Real-Time News Curation?

Key Benefits For Users

1. Saves tons of time People can subscribe specifically to your news selection if your focus matches their specific interest and save tons of time in not having to scan each and every news story from all the sites that cover their interest.
2. Guarantees the ability to stay updated on a specific topic at all times
3. Creates a trusted information source that can be relied upon for business
4. Enables the ongoing discovery of new news sources and market / topic / actors
5. Provides a channel in which diversity and varied opinions and more valued than anything else
6. Creates a "trusted" relationship with the curator-newsmaster as he builds its reputation and credibility not on advertising and commercial partnerships but on its integrity and ability to provide true value at every step.
7. Generates many valuable information channels
   In turn this approach to highly specialized and curated news channels, multiplies the number of opportunities for providing, unique, specialized information value to a huge number of audiences now defined not by their demographics but by their specific "interests". Such new channels could provide to users much greater value than the one traditional offered by mainstream news channels.

Key Benefits For Curators - Newsmasters

1. Creates unique value not available elsewhere Providing your original filtered news selection of what is to be read out there on a systematic basis can be of great value to your readers.
2. Increases your authority on a specific topic
   When someone starts being a resource for news to others he gains in credibility and authority in his field of interest. Just like for newspapers, people view the ability of selecting and identifying relevant news to publish a high-authority trait. Who do you perceive as having a greater command of a topic? Someone who writes a news story for a news company or someone who picks up the best news from all of the authors of all the news companies?
3. Benefits your SEO
   Newsradars are the love of search engines which are always looking for fresh, new, high-quality content, possibly on a specific topic.
4. Supports alternative business and monetization models
   Newsradars can be used in a number of ways to provide both extra value to your readers as well as to create more content on a topic, introducing a new content space for sponsorship, enriching an existing guide and more.
5. Provides new opportunities
   By realizing the value that news curation can bring to your activity, you may be able to free up a significant new time and energy which you had frozen into other less effective content production activities.
6. Helps the system scale
   The newsmaster helps the system scale, provides higher quality and more relevant content to be accessible by a greater number of people, does the dirty job of categorizing, ordering and separating news according to specific audiences and interests.
7. Helps others stay informed and updated on their most-sought after topics
   Helps you help those who are really interested in a specific area to learn more, make sense, and be much better updated on what is actually happening.
8. Introduces human-based filtering to the news distribution ecosystem
   The unique value that the newsmaster brings into the information economy equation is the more formal acknowledgement and introduction of a human-based news filtering into the news distribution mechanism.

Conclusion

Not everyone needs to be a front line reporter or a blogger.

There is a need for news-jockeys to look at this ocean of information and select the important from the superficial, the original from the cloned, the fresh from the replay.

Instead of going out there to generate more content, consider how much value can be provided by simply selecting and organizing the very best that is out there.

"The old model was "one to many" (NBC -> viewers). The new model is "one to a few" (YOU -> your friends and followers). That means there is an overwhelming explosion of content being created (Twitter feeds, blog posts, Flickr photos, Facebook updates) and most of it is interesting to a very small number of people. But, mixed in with this cacophony of consumer content, there is contextually relevant material that needs to be discovered, sorted, and made "brand safe" for advertisers.

Curation is the new role of media professionals.

Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and -- most importantly - giving folks who don't want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It's what we always expected from our media, and now they've got the tools to do it better.

Yes, that's right, the future of media is better, not worse. It's more detailed, multi-faceted and nuanced.

Curation is the sibling of aggregation, a word that the web has know for a while.

Aggregation means gathering; finding all videos with the key words "Easter Supper" in them. But as more devices like cell phones are used to create content (video of a hotel room, a tweet from a rock concert, an audio post from a political protest) gathering no longer adds value.

In fact, aggregation can equal aggravation.

Strangely enough, curation shifts the balance of power back to brands and publications. While anyone can make content, the decision to gather it, and present it by trusted content curators has more risk, and therefore more value."

Steve Rosenbuam
http://www.businessinsider.com/can-curation-save-media-2009-4

“We need passionate experts of all kinds to be able to wrap their future-looking goggles and to see those individual stories as a map rather than a set of individual road lines.” (Robin Good)

End of Part 1 - Why We Need It

Coming up next in this Complete Guide to Real-Time News Content Curation:
In Part 2 - Aggregation Is Not Curation
In Part 3 - Types of Curation and Real World Examples
In Part 4 - How To Do It
In Part 5 - The Curator Attributes And Skills
In Part 6 - The Tools Universe
In Part 7 - Business Applications and Trends
In Part 8 - Legal issues

Recommended Readings

• Content Curation: Bringing Order to Information Overload
  by Christy Barksdale - PR 20/20 - April 8, 2010
• The Content Strategist as Digital Curator
  by Erin Scime - A List Apart - December 8, 2009
• Content Curation: Why Is The Content Curator The Key Emerging Online Editorial Role Of The Future?
  by Rohit Bhargava - MasterNewMedia - April 24, 2010
• Why Feedback and Filters are Necessary in Social Media
  by Howard Greenstein - Mashable - July 1, 2010

Originally written and "curated" by Robin Good with the editorial help of Daniele Bazzano and first published on September 7th, 2010 on MasterNewMedia as "Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering And Newsradars - The Complete Guide Part 1: Why We Need It"

Photo credits:
The Natural Remedy - The Spontaneous Evolution of Online News Curation - Prevention
RSS Aggregation - juliengron
Persistent Searches - Jay Simmons
Social Curation - Silex Technologies

Photo credit: Ndul

By employing sound information architecture principles you can develop a content organization and navigation strategy that allows your readers to easily locate what they are looking for while having a rich and enjoyable user-experience.

For example visual site maps and visually grouped search results are much better approaches to help a user find what he is looking for than traditional linear text-based search engine result pages.

The information provided is exactly the same, but it's the way the information itself is presented, organized and connected to your navigation system which provides two very different user experiences.

And these type of challenges were the ones encountered by Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas and Luigi Spagnolo a team of content and information architects, when asked to design an interface and content navigation system capable of handling a huge amount of data belonging to the Italian cultural heritage archives.

Following their successful work, the team decided to prepare an in-depth report where they explain and illustrate their fascinating research and content design journey. Their goal is to help more people understand how information architecture principles can be effectively utilized to structure the content of a web site and how these same principles can help you repurpose information in ways that make it more easily discoverable and visually-intriguing for your readers.

While Part 1 of this report dealt more with the theory and the challenges behind the design of a large cultural web site, Part 2 explains what are the actual steps you need to take to organize and present information in simple and engaging ways without overwhelming your final readers.

Here is Part 2 - Information Architecture: How To Help Users Find Relevant Content (Part 1)

In Search of Novel Ways To Design Large Cultural Web Sites

by Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas and Luigi Spagnolo

Information Architecture Put To Use

Fig 1: SEE-IA design strategies satisfy fundamental requirements of the user experience.

Findability, serendipitous discovery, "at a glance" sense-making, playful exploration, branding and communication strength, as well as, of course, usability were considered critical requirements for the web site (Figure 1).

To tackle this challenge, we introduced SEE-IA (SEarch-Enhanced information architecture - pron. "see ya"), an integrated set of interactive and RIA-enabled design strategies that leverage existing search patterns, such as faceted search, and properly integrates them with engineered information architectures, to support important requirements for the user experience (see Figure 1) in large, content-intensive web applications.

The combination of search mechanisms and information architecture has already been exploited, but quite exclusively on digital libraries, archives and the like only, where information retrieval is the main user experience and therefore findability is the main requirement.

The novelty of SEE-IA lies in the fact that it blends faceted search (empowered by RIAs) with information architecture, supporting not only findability (see goals 2 and 3) but also serendipity (goal 4), "at a glance" sense making (goal 1), and playful exploration (goal 7).

Strategies for properly communicating introductory content over a collection of information are also proposed (goal 5) and for enhancing branding and communication (goal 8).

1. Simplify Content Hierarchy

The first steps of a SEE-IA design are the same as those of a "traditional" information architecture.

But instead of plunging into levels and levels of hierarchy, the designer stops almost at the surface, rather concentrating on:

• Communication issues (definition of the relevant facets, as well as of the collections of homogeneous or heterogeneous items to search into, e.g. "cultural venues", including "museums" and "archaeological sites"),
• visualization strategies for facets (e.g. tag clouds), and
• search results (interactive maps).

The idea is that the hierarchy of the web site can be simplified by designing in advance its first levels only (corresponding to the main sections) and delegating the creation and customization of the deeper levels (the group of topics) to search mechanisms.

As already mentioned in the background section of this paper, faceted search permits simulating dynamic access structures.

Does the user want to find museums in southern Italy related to Magna Graecia (Italian Greek colonies) civilization? No problem.

1. Select "museums" from a "type of cultural venue" facet,
2. "Southern Italy" from the geographical facet and
3. "Magna Graecia" from a cultural facet (e.g. showing the main civilizations and periods of Italian history).
4. If "soprintendenze" (local branches of the Ministry) are interesting too, add this value to the "cultural venue" facet, eventually getting a customized list (Figure 4).

The user can select the above facets in the any desired order, getting results after each selection in a quick, highly reactive way.

These results turn out to be navigation hints that steer the interaction, like… in a dialogue!

Thus playful exploration and serendipitous discovery are supported, as well as the search for something specific.

2. Visualize Search

An effective visualization of both facet values and results is crucial for allowing "at a glance" sense-making.

We propose to use tag clouds to visualize the facets’ values, and interactive maps and lists for the results.

2.1 Tag Clouds

Values belonging to particularly relevant facets can be displayed as tag clouds, where the font size of the term is proportional to its relevance.

Moreover, the size of the terms changes as interaction moves on and new selections are made (see figure 3).

2.2 Interactive Maps

Fig 2: The interactive map offers the user the possibility to select the type of cultural venue (museums, soprintendenze or archeological sites: B), the geographical area (C), and the cultural dimension (D). Results are shown in the map (A) by means of circles, the color and size of which tell "at a glance" the type of venue and its relevance to the user.

To enhance "at a glance" the understating and communication strength of a web site, one option is the use of maps where results are geographically displayed.

But, instead of coupling exact locations and items (that would result in a mess – were the items too many and too closely located), results are shown by means of markers, the size and colors of which are signs on their own.

For example, in our case studies, three kinds of venues can be explored (museums, "soprintendenze" and archeological sites). Each of them is visualized by a marker (a circle) of a different color.

Moreover, the circle’s size correspond to the number of results (which is also explicitly stated by a number in the middle of the circle itself – see figure 2).

The results of the "faceted search" can be visualized in more than one way, in order to improve findability.

For example, in our case study, zooming on the geographical area is possible (displaying results at region’s level, down to provinces and the exact location).

2.3 Interactive Lists

Fig 4: Museums and "soprintendenze", focusing on "Magna Graecia" in Southern Italy. An interactive list (A), with introductory information (B), an interactive tooltip (C), and search history (D), is provided.

Traditional lists with a sequence of items are another possibility (figure 4).

The user here is allowed to sort and group items according to the same criteria of the facets.

2.4 Groups of Items

Groups of items; for example, "museums and archeological sites of Magna Graeciain Southern Italy", are an important way to suggest to the user where relevant information is.

A mere list of items, however, is often not sufficient.

A "traditional" information architecture usually provides a meaningful introduction, by explaining; for example, what Magna Graecia was.

A "traditional" search engine would instead provide a mere list of items (hopefully suitably ranked), leaving to the user the task of making sense out of it: Dynamically created groups of items, such as a list of search results, may be relevant, but also "disconcerting" if not properly introduced.

Since it is obviously impossible to plan in advance an introduction specifically tailored for a group of topics that is dynamically created, we propose to associate a brief explanatory text (and image) to each facet’s value.

This text can be used as a tooltip before making a selection (see Figure 4-C) and as an introductory text after the selection is made (Figure 4-B); the combination of the single terms’ explanations can be used as a sort of introductory text, that although not specifically tailored could still greatly help users make sense of their browsing experience.

Eventually, some groups of topics could be pre-planned and therefore deserve ad hoc introductory texts if they emerged as relevant according to the web site’s usage statistics or if the curators deemed them interesting.

A combination of search mechanisms and (partly pre-planned) information architecture will emerge over time.

3. Focus On Context and Orientation

Once users locate a set of items, say for example, "museums and archeological sites, about Magna Graecia in Southern Italy", a number of typical actions may follow:

• Glancing through the index of items,
• selecting one item and looking at its details,
• navigating to the next item (guided tour),
• navigating from one item to a related one (hypertext navigation),
• navigating back to the index for selecting another item, etc.

To support these activities, "context" and "orientation" are critical.

If traditional, well engineered information architectures are very good at this, search engines, in general, are not.

In SEE-IA, dynamically generated groups of items are "first class citizens". They can be experienced with rich interface elements such as modal windows and consolidated navigation patterns (like indexed and guided navigation: See Bolchini and Paolini, 2006) so that:

• The passage between the two types of navigation is natural and
• the orientation, i.e. the user awareness of the current status of navigation, is still ensured.

A search history (like the one show in figure 4-D) can be introduced to let the user go back to the previous steps of exploration, listed as links in inverse chronological order.

Dynamically generated sets can become "temporary indexes", valid only within the current session, or can be saved, becoming a stable feature of a customized version of the web site (available to the users who generated them).

As far as links and hypertext navigation are concerned, there is no difference between the predefined set of items and the dynamically generated one.

Customized information architecture is what we are aiming at, and what is provided by this application.

The Pros of Information Architecture

Fig 3: Browsing Archeology (Museums and Soprintendenze) in Italy. Northern Italy (A), with Romans ("Romani") being the most important civilization, and Southern Italy (B), where Magna Graecia ("Magna Grecia") and Italics ("Italici") civilizations emerge as relevant too.

The benefits for the user are:

• Findability: Expert users can easily locate the venues of the type (e.g. museums), geographical area and cultural characterization (e.g. "Italics") they are looking for.
• Serendipity: Non-expert users may discover cultural dimensions unknown to them, or unexpected locations relevant for a cultural dimension (say ‘Etruscan’).
• At-a-glance sense-making: Users (whatever the level of expertise) may immediately grasp where venues (of the different types) are distributed in Italy, and their cultural characterization.
• Branding and communication strength: Users receive a strong communication message, i.e. the richness and wide distribution of the archeological patrimony of Italy (one of the intended "brand" goals for our case study).
• Playful discovery: Expert and non-expert users are both likely to "play" with this engaging interface to discover cultural information.

In addition, there is a remarkable educational effect: Users acquire knowledge not only from predefined contents but also from something that emerges dynamically from the interaction and visualization themselves.

For example, if they select the Northern area of Italy, "Romans" is the most important cultural dimension, while "Italics" is poorly represented (Figure 3-A).

Selecting the Southern area, "Magna Graecia" and "Italics" emerge as relevant too (Figure 3-B).

Or if they look at the cultural dimensions for Northern Italy, they may be surprised to discover that Celts are there. This is a piece of information they do not get by reading a text, but rather by playfully interacting with the application.

Serendipitous "learning by doing", which is so typical of games (Gee, 2005), is thus supported.

Of course, a fundamental pre-requisite for this playful exploration is a quick and reactive interface: That is why the use of RIAs is "mandatory".

The Cons of Information Architecture

After having illustrated the positive impact of SEE-IA methodology on user experience requirements, we focus here on the feasibility and reliability of implementing web applications based on our approach.

This new generation of web sites can be implemented using and extending reliable, existing tools, such as proprietary or open source content managements systems, as we did for our case study, where the EzPublish 4.0 open source CMS was employed, with the proper customizations.

AJAX frameworks and lightweight open source tools like Simile Exhibit can be employed as good starting points for implementing faceted search and rich interactive visualizations.

Search servers like Apache Solr can ensure high scalability, allowing multi-faceted searching on thousands of items contemporarily.

The high flexibility of SEE-IA makes it suitable not only for new web applications "designed from scratch", but also for existing web sites penalized by a too rigid and complex hierarchical organization.

It is possible to apply the SEE-IA design strategy to simplify the overall hierarchy by reducing the number of levels and by reusing the metadata coming from the existing classification criteria (and additional metadata, if required) for building dynamic, multi-faceted navigation structures.

RIA-based solutions on top of the redesigned information architecture will provide at-a-glance and deeper understanding, communicative impact and user engagement.

Conclusion

In this paper we discuss the creation of a new generation of (very) large content-intensive web sites, coupling "traditional" engineered information architectures (offering strong organization, powerful navigation, context orientation, etc.) with features provided by search patterns and advanced interfaces.

For the users, benefits are the possibility of easily locating what they are looking for, and most of all, the chance of engaging in a rich and educational experience where "learning" comes not only from texts, but also from the interaction itself.

For designers and developers, SEE-IA dramatically simplifies the problem of designing complex information architectures and allows them to concentrate on the communication/cultural issues directly.

Future research will consider the following aspects:

• Integration of other already existing search patterns, such as query suggestions while typing in a search box.
• Adaptive combination of facet values in conjunction or disjunction, depending on the context: While in some cases combing in conjunction is desirable (e.g. "search for museums that have both Greek and Roman artifacts"), in others a disjunctive combination is more suitable (e.g. "search for museums in Italy or in Switzerland").
• Dynamic transition structures and other advanced semantic search patterns based on semantic relationships, allowing users to dynamically explore related contents (even sets): E. g. from the list of museums in Northern Italy, to the list of the Roman bronze statues in them
• Customization of the visualization tools, for example allowing the users to decide what facets they want to visualize as tag clouds
• Application of SEE-IA in other contexts, like the social web; we are currently working on interactive filtering of discussions about a cultural "narrative" for the Cantonale Museum of Lugano.

End of Part 2 -- Part 1 here

Originally written by Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas and Luigi Spagnolo for Archives & Museum Informatics, and first published on April 21st, 2010 as In Search of Novel Ways To Design Large Cultural Web Sites.

About Stefano De Caro

Stefano De Caro is General Director for Antiquities within the Italian Ministry of Culture, as well as a University lecturer, archaeology researcher and editor of several scientific journals in the cultural field. De Caro has been awarded honorific distinctions from Italian and French state officials for his cultural merits.

About Nicoletta Di Blas

Nicoletta Di Blas is a researcher with the Department of Electronics and Information of Politecnico di Milano. She currently teaches Communication Theory for Politecnico di Milano (Como campus) and Communication for Cultural Heritage for the University of Lugano (Switzerland), at the TEC–CH (Technology-Enhanced Communication for Cultural Heritage) master course.

About Luigi Spagnolo

Luigi Spagnolo has taken his Master of Science in Computer Engineering for Communication from the Politecnico di Milano, graduating with honors in 2008. Since 2009 he is a doctoral student in computer science at the Politecnico di Milano. He works at the HOC-lab of the Department of Electronics and Information of the Politecnico di Milano, collaborating at design and development of the new website for the Directorate-General for Antiquities of the Italian Ministry of culture and at other web projects.

Photo credits:
Tag Clouds - Bill Lindmeier
1. Simplify Content Hierarchy - Clipart
2.4 Group of Items - picpics
3. Focus On Context and Orientation - Sgame